Poem in October (Dylan Thomas)

Okay, first of all, blogger is screwing up the formatting of this poem and the formatting is important, so I deleted it from the post. Go read it here.

Why don't you read it aloud to yourself once or twice? Then you can go listen to the poet himself read it if you like.

When I was your age, Dylan Thomas was one of my favorite poets. As I read his poems now, I remember how I felt when I was a little younger than you and reading them for the first time: I couldn't always understand the literal meaning of the poems, but I loved the sound of the language and especially the use of imagery, at once stark and opulent.

In one of my classes last week, one of my professors took a break from his lecture (on ritual and anthropology) to recite the first stanza of this poem, from memory, from the podium. It was a wonderful and unexpected moment because I could tell how much he loved it. (We are doing this poem today, not because I encountered it in lecture, but because we are working through a short paperback anthology.)

In some ways, this poem reminds me of "The Wild Swans at Coole," which we studied together when you were in tenth grade (Mr. Kerrick taught it to you). You might not remember. You can go look at that poem here if you like to jog your memory and see what I mean.

Let's start at the beginning of the poem: "It was my thirtieth year to heaven..." The beginning of the poem is straightforward: "It was my thirtieth year." We might expect a poem about aging, etc. But the phrase "to heaven" is somewhat less expected. Is "to heaven" an adverb or an adjective phrase here, and what on earth is it communicating? When do we normally use a pattern like this?

The phrase "to heaven" by itself suggests that heaven is a kind of destination: for the poet or, in this case, for the passage of time. When Thomas writes, "It was my thirtieth year to heaven," he suggests that his life has a trajectory which is carrying him closer and closer to his death, but also that he thinks of his death in an essentially optimistic way. In the opening line, he suggests to us: "This is going to be a poem about time. What's more, I am going to imagine time as something that will one day bring me, Dylan Thomas, to heaven." But his way of doing it is much more beautiful. Do you see how the compression and the oblique way of writing in this poem is actually purposeful?

Here are a few of the things I notice as I read this poem now:

a) The stanza form is lovely but I don't recognize it. One of the beautiful things that it does is to give certain individual phrases and words as much emphasis as entire clauses. Take a look at the beginning of the third stanza:

A springful of larks in a rolling

Cloud and the roadside bushes brimming with whistling

Blackbirds and the sun of October

Summery

On the hill’s shoulder...

Here, because of the highly irregular line length, Dylan is able to group "cloud and the roadside bushes brimming with whistling" into a single cluster of images, as if all these things are present all at once together in his field of vision. At the same time, the word "summery" gets an entire line all to itself. It's the first time in the poem that we've had a one-word line. In a way, the form here suggests that the word "summery" is as weighty or as deserving of our attention as the whole cluster of images in line two. That's interesting. Why should summer be so important?

Any time you see a poem that uses seasons or times of day in a really prominent way, you should stop and ask yourself how the poet's use of seasons or times is connected to the experience at the heart of the poem. That's especially true when you are reading a poem about aging or life passages. In this case, Thomas is 30--a little older than me :) , way older than you--still in his youth, but approaching middle age. In a sense, he is in the summer of his life. I guess I am in the summer of my life too. You are still in the spring of your life. :)

Here, summery is important partly because it's a word with such strong feelings attached to it, and partly (no doubt) because Thomas liked the word and wanted it to ring all through the stanza, but also partly because it has symbolic significance in this particular poem about aging. Thomas is in October, but it's a "summery" October, partly because the poet is in the summer of his life. "The Wild Swans at Coole" also takes place in autumn, and it feels like fall: the world of the poem is "dry" and "still." It's not a coincidence that, when he wrote the poem, Yeats was significantly older than thirty (and more importantly, he felt like he was getting old). But the world of Thomas' poem is wet and sunny. If you read the poem again, you can see that he really has to be inventive in order to write an October poem about summer. By the time you're done reading, the title of the poem has almost come to seem ironic. It's a poem "in October," but is it an "October poem"? I don't know.

Another thing to notice: the line breaks in this stanza make it seem for a split second as if "whistling" and "rolling" were gerunds. That's most evident in the line we just looked at: "Cloud and the roadside bushes brimming with whistling." It's possible for a bush to be brimming with whistling in a certain way, right? A bush could be full of sound. So for just a moment, as we are moving on to the next line, we have a picture in our heads of a bush full of whistling--and then we discover that in fact the bush is full of whistling blackbirds. But the suspension caused by the line break here creates an image all its own. Do you see what I mean?

b) The poem is full of first-person pronouns. Why is that? Why does the poet choose to talk directly about himself so much? How would the poem be different if he communicated his feelings indirectly?

c) The first part of the poem says nothing about stories or narrative, but the second part of the poem has lots of narrative. What's more, this use of narrative seems to provoke the emotional crisis on the part of the speaker: when the speaker starts to talk about all of the listening and telling that he did in his youth, that's when he connects to his own past and begins to cry (in the sixth stanza). Somehow, even the sunlight is connected to "parables." In fact, the idea of storytelling/listening is connected to summer at other points in the second part of the poem: we have "the parables/Of sun light" and "listening/Summertime." It seems that, for Thomas, the idea of getting older is connected to the idea of telling stories (maybe to the idea of having a personal history).

Another cool thing is how individual words are repeated a lot, even with the same line or two. Can you find any? Why do you think Thomas recycles?

I'm sure I'm missing lots of stuff, but that's fine. :)

If I were writing an AP essay about this, I'd personally hit the following topics:

a) the relation between the poet's age and the season/hour of day (anytime you have a poem about aging, this is almost a giveaway; or if it's not there you should ask yourself why)

b) the essentially optimistic tone of the poem, even through its central crisis

c) the use of form (particularly with respect to how it emphasizes the short lines).

That would give me a solid forty-minute essay, I think. If you can deal with the arc of the poem, you should; but if you can't handle it adequately in the time you've got, forget about it and hit the giveaways.

I think one could almost map out the arc of this poem by looking at the shortest lines in each stanza. Here they are:

Priested shore
That second (i.e., that moment)

And I rose
And the gates

Summery
Wind blow cold

Brown as owls
My birthday

With apples
Of sun light

Where a boy
Sang alive

In the sun.
Still be sung

What kind of impression do you get just from looking at those fragments?

Don't take anything I've written here as an absolute truth; I'm just thinking aloud. :) But these are the kind of questions that the poem raises for me as I read it for the first time (or the first time in years).