Dylan Thomas

After the Funeral" is a tribute and elegy to Thomas' aunt Ann Jones with whom he shared a deep bond. The death of Aunt Jones left a profound impact on the poet. The poem "Fern-Hill" commemorates the happy moments he spent on Aunt Jones' farm. This particular poem stands apart from the other poems of Thomas: it is the only one that is associated with an individual while others deal with experiences or abstractions. The poem begins in the typical style of the elegy expressing contempt for the hypocritical mourners whose formal salutations of grief are depicted as "mule praises" and "brays". They appear like asses in their superficiality and shook they ass-like ears rendering the tragic situation a mockery. They walked "muffle-toed' in keeping with the atmosphere of the funeral. "Tap-tap" also refers to the sound of nails being hammered into the coffin.

Dylan Thomas' radio play Under Milk Wood was performed on stage and television soon after its BBC radio premiere won the Prix Italia in 1954. Textual analysis of the 1957 BBC television production demonstrates how it contributed new resonances deriving from the medium's performative conventions and communicative strategies. The nature of the aesthetic values sought by the professional critic and the domestic viewer are evaluated: it is observed that the comparative approach of critics, focusing overwhelmingly on the work's originating form, inhibits full engagement with the innovative creative possibilities of performances of Under Milk Wood in forms of representation with a visual dimension.

This article discusses bardic voice in the radio play "Under Milk Wood" by Dylan Thomas and the Arthurian cycle of poetry by Charles Williams. To choose bardic voice is automatically to take a slight step back from realism. In the play, Thomas was able to speak in a Welsh mode of bardic voice using a contemporary setting. He could do so primarily because he was Welsh and had conscious access to bardic techniques and attitudes. In contrast, Charles Williams, an English poet and contemporary of Thomas' and member if the Inklings group in Oxford, whose poetry cycle attempted to resurrect medieval Welsh poetry in what he calls a mythopoeic context, falls short precisely because he concentrates on setting rather than bardic stance.

of the Long-legged Bait" (1941) is, as the poet noted, "really a ballad": it is a long narrative poem (Thomas's longest), in simple stanzas (quatrains), with roughly four beats (actually, three to five) in each line. Although its setting (at sea in a boat) is not typical for English ballads, its focus on a few main characters, its use of dialogue, its appeal to the mysterious and magical, and its sparse attention to circumstantial detail all fit the ballad tradition. Like many of Thomas's poems, his "Ballad" lies aslant the tradition it invokes, and in so doing it lays bare the complexity of the tradition.

Courtesy of Living Time™ Media International this complete publication is available to download from Academia.Edu until 31st December 2019. This short story anthology contains thirteen complete tales of horror by the following authors: Saki (H.H. Munro), W.W. Jacobs, Sir Osbert Sitwell, Washington Irving, H.G. Wells, H.P. Lovecraft, Guy de Maupassant, Leonid Andreyev, Jakob Sandman, Ray Bradbury, Edgar Allan Poe, Ambrose Bierce and Dylan Thomas. The collection of stories ranges over all territories of horror - the uncanny, the gruesome, the supernatural, the unexplainable and the simply scream-out-loud terrifying. All of the stories are presented in their re-edited formats by LTMI™ and the collection is opened by a short introduction by Alderson Smith, Head of Publishing for Living Time™ Media International.

In this writer’s opinion, Dylan Thomas was one of the greatest English language poets of the twentieth-century. This essay conducts a close reading of Thomas’s superb poem ‘A Winter’s Tale’ in order to establish yet another view as to the factors that combine to form what we understand as being poetry. These reflections upon the question ‘what is poetry?’ are focused upon two primary strands referred to as: reception (how the poem sounds) and perception (what the poem says). ‘Reception’, ideally obtained through the ears rather than the eyes, relies upon qualities of sound; through sound-based choices of word selection, stress, metre, rhythm, rhyme - and the structural techniques and effects that can be grouped under the heading: ‘phonemic patterns’; while ‘perception’ depends, in addition, upon the poet’s manipulation of reader emotions and comprehension through language choices, narrative movements, the use of imagery, metaphor, allegory, rhetoric, syntax and the degree and quality of meaning intended. Structure and poetic mechanisms represent the contrivances and processes used to twine and interlace these two strands so as to create whatever effects are intended or suggested by the poet - and can thus be thought of as features which will distinguish a piece as a poem in contrast to other forms of written or oral communication.

All somewhat prolix; so here’s a more summative determination. A successful poem is a method of patterned, concise, memorable and rewarding expression that satisfies a recipient’s desire for enthusiastic understanding by involving his or her emotions. How? Initially, and above all, by striving to achieve a degree of combined insight and aural appreciation that provokes those emotional or considered reactions that trigger an emphatic admiring ‘yes’. Next, by poetically addressing those issues and reflections within the boundless panoply of human experience so that at least some people will be captivated by the handling of and response to the subject matter. Then, there is language and musicality; the selection of each word so that how it sounds (resonates, echoes, jangles, chimes, rhymes, whispers, rings et al), alone and with its surrounding cohorts, is deemed to be equally as vital as what it may mean. And the language choices themselves: to be as perfect a selection as possible in order to convey successfully the emotions and imagery intended by the poet - so that the word-choice qualities of suggestion, description, undertone, inference and nuance are faultless. Finally, there are the techniques and devices peculiar to poetry: rhythm, metre, phonemic patterns and an array of mechanisms calculated to convey mood and meaning.

A new (2020) comprehensive, in-depth analysis of Dylan Thomas’s 1934 poem “Especially when the October Wind” - a brilliant early work much admired by poetry students and Thomas aficionados. The poem reflects and explains Thomas's unique relationship and personal connection with individual words and their function within his poetry. For example, why does he open the poem with the word  'Especially''? 

This essay assesses what the poem  is about, its overall purpose, and seeks to define what  Dylan Thomas was trying to convey to his readers and listeners. As within my other Thomas-centred reviews, the core of the essay is focused upon detailed explication. A stanza by stanza, line by line construal which, noting imagery, vocabulary and syntax, endeavours to elicit meaning, poetic intention and, where appropriate, identifies alternative interpretations. In addition, "Especially when the October Wind" , created at a time when Thomas was yet to be widely recognised as a serious poet, is examined from a ‘craftsmanship’ viewpoint - thus, the essay explores the poet’s utilisation of various techniques of symbolism, prosody and construction. So that  use of:-  structure and metre, onomatopoeia, themes and tone, alliteration and assonance, consonance and rhyme, refrain and repetition, enjambment are identified and the poet’s underlying rationale for their employment is suggested. Finally, as is the case with many of Thomas’s works, critical assessments of "Especially when the October Wind" are plentiful - as an early prototypical poem within the Thomas oeuvre, it has attracted a significant degree of analysis, interpretation and criticism. This essay notes some of the views expressed and challenges or applauds them as appropriate.

Sylvia Plath's early works, "On the Decline of Oracles" and "Ouija" has been misread for more than half a century as watered-down romanticism from a young, still-green poetess, or simply ekphrastic poetry. When viewed in context of Plath's interests and the times, these two poems are revealed to be literary tributes to Welsh poetic star, Dylan Thomas. First Published in Poetry Wales, July 2016.

This is a new (2021) study of Dylan Thomas's engagingly cryptic poem "The Conversation of Prayer". The essay particularly explores the poet's singular use of short, everyday words to present his images and the enigmatic nature of the 'conversation' and its absorbing outcome. The distinctive rhyme scheme is examined in some depth together with various aspects of the poetics, specifically:- the use of phonemic patterns, syntax and enjambment, repetition, alliteration and the poems tone and mood. The essay is directed towards both students of poetry and fellow Dylan Thomas enthusiasts.

The overall intention of this new (2019) study is to provide an analysis of the poem “Lament” that, hopefully, will be beneficial to both students and interested Dylan Thomas readers. The essay first addresses the background to “Lament”:- its position as a ‘late’ poem within the twenty-year (approximately) calendar of the Thomas oeuvre; the possible influences of the poet’s domestic and productive life at the time of writing; its synchronicity with Thomas’s other creative endeavours. Then the poem’s raunchy theme and its objective are examined: what is the poem about and what is its overall purpose? What is the poem’s thematic structure, its mood and its tone? What is Dylan Thomas trying to communicate to his readers and listeners? But the core of this essay centres upon detailed explication:- a stanza by stanza, line by line construal which, noting imagery, vocabulary and syntax, endeavours to elicit meaning, poetic intention and, where appropriate, identifies alternative interpretations. Then there’s an examination of the poetics:- “Lament”, written just thirty months before Thomas’s untimely death, exemplifies a wide range of poetic techniques and the art of versification. The abundant metaphors and symbols are reviewed; the prosody and Thomas’s craftsmanship are also examined by highlighting and suggesting the poet’s rationale behind instances and usages of (e.g.):-  structure and metre, themes and tone, alliteration and assonance, consonance and rhyme, refrain and repetition, enjambment. Next, the essay  reviews how the poem sounds in recital. Almost all of Thomas’s poetry was primarily designed for the ear - it was for ‘listening to’ as well as for ‘looking at’. “Lament” in particular, is a poem noted for its powerful auditory impact. Thomas’s own remarkable recorded recitation of the poem is examined and his tonal, volume and vocal variations are recognised and the effects explored. Finally, within the range of works which evaluate and critique Dylan Thomas’s poetry, assessments of “Lament” are conspicuous - probably due to its erotic themes, its reputed bawdiness and suggestive imagery. The essay notes some of the views expressed and challenges or applauds them as appropriate.

To begin at a beginning, in the tricksterish address that Dylan Thomas made to his “readers, the strangers[,]” in the ‘Author’s Note’ to the 1952 edition of the Collected Poems, he wrote, “I read somewhere of a shepherd who, when asked why he made, from inside tiny fairy rings, ritual observances to the moon to protect his flock, replied: ‘I’d be a damn’ fool if I didn’t!’  These poems with all their crudities, doubts and confusions, are written for the love of Man and in praise of God, and I’d be a damn’ fool if they weren’t.”  It could be argued that this parabolic anecdote, written late in Thomas’s short, tragic, career suggests a distorted and distorting vision of his Collected Poems.  In its invocation of the emblematic figure of the pastoral tradition; its conjuring of an incantatory, twilit rurality; and its apparent apology for the unrefined, rustic quality of its imperfect paeans of love and praise to humanity and a personal creator, it seems to present to the “strangers” an oeuvre that appears to have more in common with the late-Romanticism of the Celtic Twilight than with a late modernism of the 1940s and the early 1950s.  Insofar as the generative site for the lexis of the more expansive and lyrical poems that Thomas wrote from 1944 onwards is the natural world, rather than the world of the body, it is perhaps understandable that these late “statements made on the way to the grave[‘]”  as Thomas described them, might be regarded as a retreat from the densely textured and obscure modernist expression of the 1930s’ poems into the clarity of a mature, late- or neo-Romantic lyricism that is rooted in the landscape of rural Carmarthenshire.  Rather than interpreting this lyrical turn towards the natural world as a rejection of modernism as a formal means of negotiating the sublime, terrifying and traumatic reality of modernity, in favour of a realist, confessional poetry of place that proffers the consolation of a pantheistic mode of vision, this paper explores how the poems that Thomas composed in the midst and in the aftermath of the Second World War, and ‘Fern Hill’ in particular, actually demonstrate a modernist appropriation, enactment and performance of a pastoralism that is as perfectly and tragically forlorn as it is textually unstable and incomplete.

This paper is a comprehensive analysis of Dylan Thomas's outstanding 'process' poem: "The force that through the green fuse." – one of Thomas’s most acclaimed poetic efforts. This impressive 1933 verse was composed and published when the poet was just nineteen years of age. As the principal work within the seven verses grouped as 'process' poems, “The force …” explores and brilliantly contrasts the birth, growth and death' connections between the natural world and himself, the poet, as an eloquent, self-examining representative of mankind.

Section 2 of the paper opens by responding to the question:- ‘what is this poem about?’ It is an undeniable fact that every entity deemed to possess what humanity might call ‘life’ in the natural world, will pass through a five-fold sequence of:- (1) birth or origination; (2) growth or juvenile development; (3) increase or procreation; (4) withering or declining; and (5) eventual death. This arrangement is obviously not a revelation – merely a simplistic way of describing anything connected with the various chronological episodes associated with the word ‘living.’ Within the animal world, mankind as a genus is blatantly evident - together with categories of creatures of all sizes from the ‘enormous’ to the ‘minute’ and similarly within the plant world from giant redwoods to the tiniest of fungal spores. As we shall see, Dylan Thomas was fascinated by this cohesion of process so that the poem endeavours to equate, or at least to parallel, the inevitable stages in his own life with the various ‘forces’ and influences that affect diverse worldly entities.

Section 3 then examines the overall structure of the poem followed by an in-depth examination of the meaning of each of the first three straightforward stanzas, together with their accompanying “And I am dumb …” couplets. Stanza four, the enigmatic, perhaps perplexing, summary of the work, merits particularly thorough attention. Alternative published critical interpretations of the stanza’s meaning are discussed and this writer’s clarification and understanding of the stanza is advocated.

Section 4 identifies and explains the poetics of this simply-structured poem. It explores Thomas’s choices of vocabulary within each stanza, followed by his use of phonemic patterns (i.e. alliteration, assonance, consonance) and reviews the poem’s rhythm and metre (i.e. syllables and stresses), grammatical structure (i.e. punctuation and enjambment) and Thomas’s use of repetition and its effects.

Section 5 reviews and evaluates the observations made by a variety of published Thomas critics – some supportive, some less so in respect of this truly unique poem.

The poem "Ceremony After a Fire Raid" deals with the death of another person, a new-born baby in an air raid. The poem was written in 1945 and published in Thomas's Deaths and Entrances in 1946. The subject of the poem is the innocent infant dead in war, completely burned in the arms of its mother. What is brought into question is the significance, the meaning of this death. Although death is essentially a complex phenomenon without explanation, without sense and meaning, the poet tries to shed light upon this reality, attempting to draw meaning from the absurdity of death.

The theme of this essay is the classical concept of the elements and how this concept is realized in the poetry of Dylan Thomas. The historiographical development of the concept and its etymology will be presented. My treatment of interpretation and textual polysemy in this paper will be subjective, but reflections on possible correlations with existing and established philosophical systems are going to be outlined. The goal of this paper is to demonstrate the unique realization of the concept in Thomas’ poetry, but likewise to consider more general patterns which are present in the text (cultural memes) and to clarify the meaning of the concept in the broader context of personal reflection and identity. All quoted poems are taken from the book 'The collected poems of Dylan Thomas (1957)', which the poet himself had edited in such a way as to contain only his best and most important works.

Key words: element, meaning, life, death, origin

While the focus of most poetry of childhood recollection can either be allocated within a ‘positive’ or ‘negative’ pairing, such broad dualism can be overly simplistic. Yet the principle of thematic binary distinction is valid so that three resulting contrasts invite meaningful analysis and are addressed within this paper. These are: delight versus anguish, family affection against family resentment, ‘adult’ voice vis-à-vis ‘child’ voice. Different attitudes to personal youthful situations are noticeable in the works of three twentieth century poets: Dylan Thomas, Seamus Heaney and Sylvia Plath. Thomas recalls blissful childhood sojourns in rhapsodic terms while Heaney, more explicitly, remembers a vigorous boyhood of warmth and family affection. Plath recalls her early years fondly but, following her bereavement, represents her later childhood as laden with anxiety and parental tension. Unsurprisingly, poetic ‘voice’ contrasts are less immediately obvious than substance-centred divisions; however, as will be explored within the selected works, a poem’s emotional disposition often varies according to whether present-day adult retrospective perceptions predominate or whether recalled childhood feelings are summoned and thus prevail.

Kognitiivinen metafora runoanalyysin selkärankana? Dylan Thomasin "After the funeral" -runon ruumiilliset kielikuvat ja koherenttiuden haaste Diskurssi, jolla metaforaa koetetaan analysoida, ei pysty välttämään metaforia itsekään. Kielellä on metatason funktio -kielessä voidaan puhua kielestä -mutta ei ole olemassa mitään metakieltä, vain monia kielen kerroksia. (Culler 1983, xi.)

This dissertation studies the themes of nationality, language, and religion in James Joyce’s Dubliners (1914), Caradoc Evans’s My People (1915), and Dylan Thomas’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dog (1940). Taking its title from Stephen Dedalus’s words in Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, it examines whether these issues act as ‘nets’ of oppression or as vehicles allowing escape from the very conventions which produce them.
Dubliners and My People have been compared since their publication but all too frequently with a focus on the veracity, or otherwise, of their stories as if they were reportage, not artistic works. This dissertation seeks to add to the field of critical scholarship of these works at a textual level, analysing them as Modernist literature which eschewed the social and cultural hegemony of their time. The assertion of Thomas as one of the ‘sons of Caradoc’ is often repeated but there has been little research done on the links between My People and Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dog and even less on these three texts combined despite their complimentary status as anglophone Modernist short stories from the periphery of the United Kingdom.
Particular attention is paid to how the structures of nationality, language, and religion are intimated, presented, and exposed within the texts through a range of critical approaches including postcolonialism, poststructuralism, and Althusserian ideological theory. This dissertation works to analyse the extent to which the examined texts constitute escapes from convention at both the narrative and formal level of the Modernist short story.

A Study of ‘Before I knocked” and the Light it Throws on Dylan Thomas’s Understanding of the Relationship between Time and Life

The poem “Before I knocked,” written in the poet’s nineteenth year, may serve as an initial basis for a discussion of the theme of time in Dylan Thomas’s poetry. Although the specific influences of the Bible, Blake and Freud are evident within this poem,  the synthesis of these elements is indubitably the unique creation of the poet’s creative imagination. The poem belongs to what has come to be known as Thomas’s ‘womb to tomb” period. The association of childhood and youth with death is probably as ancient as poetry itself. But here Thomas carries this association to the final conclusion of establishing a link between the ultimate beginning of life and its ultimate end, conception in the womb and the moment of death.
For Thomas ‘Paradise’ posed a symbol of utmost importance not least because conceptually it bridged Man’s origin with human mortality, the price paid for disobedience to God according to the narrative of Genesis. In Paradise Lost Milton interpreted the Fall as being the result not only of eating an apple but also of the following act of indulging in sexual intercourse. In this regard Thomas is more anatomically specific. W. J. Tindal begins his interpretation of the poem with the words: The speaker is an undifferentiated, vital fluid before it has assumed shape as a sperm cell: yet this blind mouth foresees. Fore-knowledge of life and death and man’s condition is the theme of this poem.( The Reader’s  Guide to Dylan Thomas, London, 1962) 46.The association of conception and death is underpinned by the idea expressed in the poem, at least implicitly by reference to the word “cross,” that Christ’s birth and death are reduplicated in every mortal’s death and that with each repetition of incarnation God “double-crosses” the mother’s womb, for in life is the seed of death. Furthermore the word ‘double-crossed’  is a play on words as it echoes the word “cross,” which had already appeared three times in the poem, first in the sense of traverse and in the other instance in reference to the religious icon. This interspersing of words with dual religious and commonplace significances is not only an essential characteristic of Thomas’s poetry, being particularly in the works of a very different poet, Robert Browning. Take a close reading of his “The Pied Piper of Hamelin” again.
We now consider a further case of a word that carries both religious and very down-to-earth matters.

What does the evolution of upright posture have to do with the origins of creative analogy? I propose that the two are vitally related. This book[*] documents the first phase of a larger project devoted to testing and refining this basic hypothesis. To do so, it becomes necessary to pay extensive attention to arms and legs—our appendage sets and the relationships that hold between them in movement and memory across our horizontal and vertical midlines. At their most extreme, the relationships that hold between our appendages give rise to new possibilities—prominently including the felt meanings, rhetorical powers and modeling affordances of X. The X figure is ubiquitous in contemporary culture, but attempts to explain our fixation with X are rare. In these pages, I explore the possibility that the X-mark is a figure of extremes and reversals—not primarily because of arbitrary cultural encoding but more basically because of entrenched body memories. These body memories involve our extremities, extended at extreme angles to form an extreme posture—a posture that is approximated across a wide range of experiences, many of which are extreme opposites. 

Chief among the uses and experiences of X are its tendencies to involve us in surprising reversals and blends. In ancient times the X-pattern was discussed as “chiasmus”, a figure which, according to Maurice Merleau-Ponty, informs the most basic elements of our bodily experience, calling into question polarized dichotomies such as subject versus object. Pushed to extremes, presumed opposites like these tend to reverse suddenly. Likewise, blended experiences of our bodily extremities - arms and legs, toes and fingers, hands and feet - provide a plausible source of grounding for unique human abilities like creative analogy or "double-scope conceptual integration". The book illustrates these dynamics by drawing attention to uses of X in history, prehistory and daily life, from sports and advertising to world mythology and languages around the world.

In short, the book argues that the origins and meanings of X go far beyond alphabets and archetypes to remembered feelings of body movements. These body memories are then projected onto other patterns and dynamics to help us make sense of the world. The argument is accomplished using a blend of insights from linguistic anthropology, cognitive linguistics, rhetoric culture and process semiotics to bring together revealing clues from languages, cultures and thinkers around the world. The Semiotics of X is the first step towards developing a larger argument on the important but neglected role that chiasmus plays in cognition. It aims to inspire continued exploration on the figure, with the full expectation that chiasmus will become for the 21st century what metaphor became for the 20th century: a revolution in thinking about the way we think.

*[Note: the uploaded pdf includes title pages, Table of Contents, Preface and Chapter 1 only].

Se hace una revisión crítica del Premio Nobel de Economía, con una recopilación del papel de Yanus Varoufakis en las negociaciones con la Unión Europea en 2015, con el apoyo de Joseph Stiglitz, Paul Krugman y Thomas Piketty, a partir de una crítica realizada por el economista colombiano Guillermo Maya Muñoz, en el que se muestra la farsa, que hay tras el Nobel de Economía.

"In my craft or sullen art" by Dylan Thomas. A new examination of this short, introspective poem that reveals, defends and endeavours to explain Thomas's overall poetic purpose and approach. Composed in 1945 and published in the following year in his Deaths and Entrances collection, the poem explores his poetic motivation, together with identifying his ideal readership ('the lovers') and, in contrast, the categories of readers that he chooses not to write for and why.

But for all their scramble and scamper, clamour on the landing, catlick and toothbrush flick, hair-whisk and stair-jump, 50 their sisters were always there before them. Up with the lady lark, they had prinked and frizzed and hot-ironed; and smug in their blossoming dresses, ribboned for the sun, in gymshoes white as the blanco'd snow, neat and silly with doilies and tomatoes they helped in the higgedly kitchen. 55 They were calm; they were virtuous; they had washed their necks; they did not romp, or fidget; and only the smallest sister put out her tongue at the noisy boys. And the woman who lived next door came into the kitchen and said that her mother, an ancient uncertain body who wore a hat with cherries, 60 was having 'one of her days' and had insisted, that very holiday morning, in carrying, all the way to the tram-stop, a photograph album and the cut-glass fruit-bowl from the front room. This was the morning when father, mending one hole in the thermos-flask, made three; 65 when the sun declared war on the butter, and the butter ran; when dogs, with all the sweet-binned backyards to wag and sniff and bicker in, chased their tails in the jostling kitchen, worried sandshoes, en dan met glanzende wangen en glimmende neus en grauwe hals, de trappen af, drie treden tegelijk. Maar spijts geklauwier en gekoers, kabaal op de overloop, pootgelik, mondgespoel, haaromdraai, trappensprong, hun zussen waren hen altijd voor. Voor dag en engelendauw gepoederd, gekroesd en gladgestreken; kittig in fleurige jurkjes, het strohoedje op, op gympjes sneeuwwitter dan wit, hielpen ze, nuffig en netjes een handje met mandjes en tomaten in de roezemoezige keuken. Zij waren bedaard; zij waren decent; zij hadden de nek gewassen; Zij dolden noch ravotten; en het was enkel de kleinste zus Die de lawaaiige jongens de tong liet zien. En de vrouw van de buren kwam binnen in de keuken en zei dat haar moeder, een antiek en onstabiel creatuur onder een hoed met kersen, 'een van haar dagen' had en zij het kunnen vond om, net op deze vakantieochtend, het traject naar de tramhalte aan te gaan met onder de arm een fotoalbum en de gebarsten fruitschaal uit de entree. Het was de morgen waarop vader bij 't fiksen van één gat in de thermosfles er nog twee bij produceerde; waarop de zon de boter zijn liefde verklaarde-en de boter smolt weg; waarop honden met hun fraai-omheinde achtertuinen om rond te snuffelen, dollen en tollen, in een overvolle keken hun staart najoegen, op strandsloefen kauwden, naar vliegen klauwden, tussen benen laveerden, handdoeken verreten, zich smalend op de wasmand posteerden. snapped at flies, writhed between legs, scratched among towels, sat smiling on hampers. 70 And if you could have listened at some of the open doors of some of the houses in the street you might have heard: 'Uncle Owen says he can't find the bottle-opener…' 'Has he looked under the hallstand? 'Willy's cut his finger…' 75 'Got your spade?' 'If somebody doesn't kill that dog…' 'Uncle Owen says why should the bottle-opener be under the hallstand?' 'Never again, never again…' 'I know I put the pepper somewhere…' 80 'Willy's bleeding…' 'Look, there's a bootlace in my bucket…' 'Oh come on, come on…' 'Let's have a look at the bootlace in your bucket…' 'If I lay my hands on that dog…' 85 'Uncle Owen's found the bottle-opener…' 'Willy's bleeding over the cheese…' And the trams that hissed like ganders took us all to the beautiful beach. There was cricket on the sand, and sand in the sponge-cake, sand-flies in the watercress, and foolish, mulish, religious donkeys on the unwilling op strandsloefen kauwden, naar vliegen klauwden, tussen benen laveerden, handdoeken verreten, zich smalend op de wasmand posteerden. Al wie zijn oren te luisteren legde bij open deuren in de straat, hoorde wellicht iets zoals: "Oom Owen zegt dat hij de kurkentrekker niet kan vinden…" "Heeft hij gekeken onder de kapstok?" "Willy heeft zijn vinger gesneden…" "Je schop al gevonden?" "Als gauw niet iemand die hond keelt…" "Oom Owen vraagt waarom de kurkentrekker onder de kapstok zou moeten liggen?" "Nooit meer, nooit meer…" "Ik weet dat ik de peper ergens gezet heb…" "Willy bloedt…" "Kijk, een teenbijter in mijn emmer…" "Komaan, zeg, komáán…" "Laten es zien, die teenbijter in je emmer…" "Al ik die hond te pakken krijg…" "Oom Owen heeft de kurkentrekker gevonden…" "D'r zit bloed van Willy op de kaas…" En de trams, net tsjilpende ganzen, brachten ons allen naar het onvolprezen strand. Je had cricket in het zand, en zand in tompoezen, zandkevers in de waterkers, en grillige, onwillig meesmuilende muilezels op pelgrimspad. 'Are there donkeys on desert islands?' 'Only sort-of donkeys.' 'What d'you mean, sort-of donkeys?' 160 'Native donkeys. They hunt things on them!' 'Sort-of walruses and seals and things?' 'Donkeys can't swim!' 'These donkeys can. They swim like whales. They swim like anything, they swim like __' 165 'Liar.' 'Liar yourself.' And two small boys fought fiercely and silently in the sand, rolling together in a ball of legs and bottoms. Then they went and saw the pierrots, or bought vanilla ices. 170 Lolling or larrikin sic that unsoiled, boiling beauty of a common day, great gods with their braces over their vests sang, spat pips, puffed smoke at wasps, gulped and ogled, forgot the rent, embraced, posed for the dicky-bird, were coarse, had rainbow-coloured 175 armpits, winked, belched, blamed the radishes, 175 looked at Ilfracombe, played hymns on paper-and-comb, peeled bananas, scratched, found seaweed in their panamas, blew up paper-bags and banged them, wished for nothing. But over all the beautiful beach "Vind je ezels op onbewoonde eilanden?" "Enkel sommige soorten." "Wat bedoel je, 'sommige soorten'?" "Eilandezels. Ze jagen er op van alles." "Soort van zeehonden en robben en zo?" "Ezels kunnen niet zwemmen." "Die ezels wel. Ze zwemmen gelijk walvissen. "Ze zwemmen gelijk van álles. Ze zwemmen gelijk…" "Je liegt." "Nee, jij liegt." En twee jochies vochten vurig en vredig in het zand, verklevend tot een bal van benen en billen. Daarna was het tijd voor de clowns, of kochten ze een ijsje vanille. De onbevlekte en onvolprezen zaligheid een doordeweekse dag te verpieteren en te verprutsen, zette menige god, de bretels over 't hemd, aan met pitten te spuwen, rook naar de wespen toe te puffen, te knuffelen, kwelen, lurpen en lonken, de huishuur te vergeten, voor 't vogeltje te poseren en te vuilbekken; met irisgekleurde okselvijvers, gluurden zij en boerden-de schuld van de radijsjes; kerkwijsjes sifflerend op een vloeitj'-en-kam, spiedden zij naar Ilfracombe, kauwden een paprika, krabden, visten zeewier in hun panama, bliezen broodzakken op en-knal!-wat wilden ze nog meer? Maar langs het ganse onvolprezen strand zee, Barbers' pole / Barbierspaal [104] Soms zegt een foto meer dan woorden: Cross man… holidays were wrong / Kruis-drager… vakanties uit den boze waren [106-7] "This article explores the ways in which the Victorian and Edwardian philosophy of rational recreation found expression in a variety of reformist campaigns, and suggests that its institutions (rather than the philosophy itself) have an important influence on contemporary leisure provision. Children and young people were seen as being easily corrupted in their spare time. The need to supervise and direct youth leisure led to approved recreational forms being inserted into school curricula, to scouting and other 'churchy' movements such as Sunday school being formed and to 'respectable' comics and children's literature being published. Adult leisure was also viewed as problematic by middle class reformers, especially in urban locations where few alternatives to drink, prostitution and gambling were seen to exist. Inspired by a wish to counter these threats and to diffuse respectable middle class forms of leisure down the social scale, voluntary and public organizations made extensive provision of sporting, cultural and educational facilities. Municipal local government was especially important in terms of its public leisure services-the parks, libraries, public halls, baths and museums. Although the ethos of rational recreation is now outmoded, most of the institutions it gave rise to are still in existence. A provider ideology to replace that of rational recreation has yet to be articulated.

The eponymous story in Dylan Thomas’s The Map of Love (1939) provides what the title promises. “Sam Rib” has drawn a “map of love” which is effectively an allegorical landscape. The other stories take place in the same allegorical “Jarvis Valley.” While there is no specific thematic continuity with the poems, there is much shared imagery and conceptualisation, and a pervasive concern with love and the nature of poetry. The second section of Adrienne Rich’s The Dream of a Common Language (1978) consists of twenty-one love poems; her epigraph is H.D.’s “I go where I love and am loved . . .” Conflating landscape with psyche, the book pivots on the nature of love and its application to poetry, equating “the drive to connect” with “the dream of a common language.” Both books suggest systems and maps, with symbolic landscapes, buildings, dwellings and journeys. This thesis argues that, despite the poets’ biographical and artistic disparities: (a) both books offer allegorical cartographies of love; (b) many features of their world-views coincide; (c) their “maps” share an orientation towards a notion of unity mediated by a feminine ideal. Aspects of cartography provide methodological tools for reading the texts. Ancient and medieval mappae mundi, and their later psycho-social allegorical offshoots, provide the context and models for extrapolating a visual projection. The conclusion will offer a plan for the construction of a conflated Mappa Mundi or World Map of Love, based on the textual “data.”

Spot di un mondo perduto Il virus, un concatenamento » Remember that murder di LUCA BANDIRALI Murder Most Foul di Bob Dylan. Io, nella mia immagine intricata, avanzo su due piani, Modellato con minerali d'uomo, oratore d'ottone, Costringo il mio spettro nel metallo, Mi bilancio sui due piatti di questo mondo gemello, Il mio mezzo spettro in armatura tengo saldo nel corridoio della morte, Al mio uomo di ferro mi avvicino di sghembo. Dylan Thomas Bob Dylan avanza da sempre su due piani, nella sua intricata immagine, proprio come aveva scritto di sé Dylan Thomas, il poeta a cui Robert Zimmerman aveva preso in prestito il nome nel 1960, quando suonava nel giro di Minneapolis (il prestito si consolidò in possesso nel 1962). Dylan non si chiamava Dylan da molto, quando Lee Oswald uccise John Fitzgerald Kennedy il 22 novembre 1963. Le cronache musicali riportano che Elvis scoppiò in lacrime davanti al televisore e che i Beach Boys, indecisi se annullare o meno un loro concerto a Marysville, optarono per suonare: e nel pomeriggio, durante

Entrambi gli ambiti del religioso e del corporale nella poesia di Dylan Thomas, soprattutto nelle liriche della prima raccolta, 18 Poems (1934), sono legati a doppio filo e suggeriscono quasi una ‘religiosità del corpo’, in linea con una dichiarazione del poeta ad apertura dei Collected Poems (1953): si tratta di poesie scritte «per amore dell’Uomo»[1], di una spiritualità che vede la propria scaturigine profonda nella carne, per così dire nel midollo delle cose, «e in lode di Dio»[2], quel Dio e quel Cristo che con l’Uomo sono un tutt’uno, e che nulla di sacro avrebbero se non fossero considerati nella loro granitica terrenità, come comunione di corpo, animalità e terra. Il Signore, il Salvatore, perfino il diavolo, sono sempre presenti come simboli, metafore: «whether praised or dismissed, – scrive W. Y. Tindall – God and Christ are always around in Thomas’ poetry […] as metaphors for nature, poet, and their creative powers»[3]. Nella poesia My hero bares his nerves (Scopre i nervi il mio eroe) le due sfere cooperano sotto una lente cupamente ironica; il giovane Thomas, appena ventenne quando uscì 18 Poems, descrive l’atto masturbatorio con toni perentori ed eroicomici (l’«eroe» è appunto identificato con il membro maschile) ricollegandolo a molti dei temi della sua prima poetica: il peccato, il sesso, la fertilità, lo scrivere poesia, qui sarcasticamente associato all’onanismo. Mistica e blasfema è l’evocazione conclusiva di Cristo, «imperatore della brama»[4] crocifisso in mezzo ai due ladroni, nell’allusione all’orgasmo come tensione massima prima della morte che fa avvizzire il corpo. Solo l’acqua – un’acqua dello scarico, beffardamente di cisterna – potrà, come il Giordano, lavare via il peccato del poeta e lenire il sacrificio del Salvatore.



[1] D. Thomas, Poesie e racconti, Torino, Einaudi, 1996, p. XX.

[2] Ibid.

[3] W. Y. Tindall, A Reader’s Guide to Dylan Thomas (1962), New York, Syracuse University Press, 1996, p. 8.

[4] D. Thomas, Poesie e racconti, cit. p. 21.

Este artigo apresenta um breve olhar sobre alguns procedimentos composicionais desenvolvidos por Igor Stravinsky na composição de In Memorian Dylan Thomas de 1953-4. Nesta composição, dedicada a memória de Dylan Thomas, Stravinsky utiliza procedimentos seriais, técnica desenvolvida pelo compositor desde o inicio da década de 1950. Observaremos as utilizações e elaborações do material serial, como o compositor distribui as diferentes ordenações da serie, suas transposições e sobreposições, o comportamento instrumental, e o desenvolvimento formal das partes integrantes da obra.