The cruelest month: Sing the sun in flight

Well, of course you can’t have a National PoetryMonth without something from Dylan Thomas. I expect Thomas is the best-known poet to come out of Wales, and he’s been part of my life since my friend Gretchen Pullen introduced me to him in high school. Gretchen was crazy mad for Thomas in the way I was besotted with Yeats.

To tell you the truth, I might just have been too young in high school to appreciate Thomas, but he grew on me. So much so that in my freshman year in college I chose to do a paper comparing his life and poetry with those of Brendan Behan. On the surface they had similarities—larger-than-life personas, hard-drinking, womanizing and poem-making Celts; pretty much everything that sends Sassenachs purse-lipped and pucker-arsed into tut-tutting tizzies.

There were major differences, of course; one being that Behan had politics in his blood, while I have this memory of finding a quote from Thomas that “politics is bloody awful”, although I’ve not been able to track it down recently. (That is a maxim that I have adopted to technology, by the way: technology is bloody awful. If you're not careful.) Another is that the general public (certainly in America) is much more familiar with the Welshman’s work than the Irishman’s.

(When I lived in Britain, I was driving somewhere with one of my English colleagues, a technocrat at the data networking company that employed me, and he mentioned "that Welsh poet" and vaguely referred to "…some really famous poem" by him. I chirped, “Do not go gentle into that good night?” He was quite pleased that I knew about it.)

If you’re a fan of Paul Simon, you might recall the line from “A Simple Desultory Philippic”:

“He doesn't dig poetry. He's so unhip that when you say Dylan, he thinks you're talking about Dylan Thomas, whoever he was. The man ain't got no culture.”

Well, I got culture.

I could haul out something reasonably obscure for you of my back pocket, because Gretchen really, really loved Thomas and she was really, really persuasive, but I’m going to go with one of his most famous poems, the one my mate Rob was talking about, written as the poet watched his father growing old and frail:

Do not go gentle into that good night,

Old age should burn and rave at close of day;

Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Though wise men at their end know dark is right,

Because their words had forked no lightning they

Do not go gentle into that good night.

Good men, the last wave by, crying how bright

Their frail deeds might have danced in a green bay,

Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Wild men who caught and sang the sun in flight,

And learn, too late, they grieved it on its way,

Do not go gentle into that good night.

Grave men, near death, who see with blinding sight

Blind eyes could blaze like meteors and be gay,

Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

And you, my father, there on the sad height,

Curse, bless, me now with your fierce tears, I pray.

Do not go gentle into that good night.

Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

You should read this one aloud; you need to hear it. If you can’t bring yourself to do it, I give you this reading by Welsh actor Philip Madoc: