Where Have the Old Words Got Me?: Explications of Dylan Thomas's Collected Poems (review)

Ralph Maud's recent collection of explications for each of the ninety-three poems in Dylan Thomas's Collected Poems 1934-1953 completes a project begun four decades earlier with his Entrances to Dylan Thomas' Poetry (1963). The first volume, as Maud explains, was a 'trial by metaphor,' an early attempt to clarify the poems only a decade after the poet's death when little was known about the connections between the work and the life of the precocious poet who burst pyrotechnically upon the London literary scene at the age of nineteen. Now, in Where Have the Old Words Got Me?, Maud explains that 'it has always been biography that has led me to the doorway of a poem.' With the 1985 publication of Paul Ferris's The Collected Letters of Dylan Thomas, the door had swung open to allow for Maud's biographical explications. It is curious, therefore, though perhaps understandable, that they are here offered alphabetically rather than in the sequence of Maud and Walford Davies's 1988 edition of the Collected Poems. Maud defends his alphabetical presentation in the present study with the explanation that Thomas himself had blurred the whole notion of chronology by going back to his notebooks and revising poems published earlier. Yeats and Auden, of course, did the same thing, yet their collected poems are still profitably, if imperfectly, explored by reference to their original sequence of composition. That quibble aside, it must be acknowledged that Maud often provides a useful historical context for the discussion of particular poems, as when he notes that Thomas wrote no poetry that we know of from July 1941 until April 1944, only reviving his imaginative output with the prospect of peace after D-Day (6 June 1944) by writing 'his great poem of peace,' 'Fern Hill.'

The strength and perhaps the shortcomings of Maud's decision to deal separately with each poem can best be appreciated by pointing to one example. The early and audacious (some would say sacrilegious) 'Before I knocked' had been given only occasional notice in Entrances but here receives extended and discrete attention. One welcomes Maud's concentrated and largely successful attempt to clarify the poem's 'basic meaning' (what Thomas himself called the 'poem's hypothesis'), while at the same time wishing for the contextual advantages of Entrances, where Maud had woven references to the poem into a broader discussion of the complex imagery in other 'Process Poems' such as 'The force that through the green fuse drives the flower,' 'A process in the weather of the heart,' and 'Especially when the October wind.' Yet without doubt this new volume gives us much more to chew on as we prepare to digest the multiple meanings straining to emerge from any of Thomas's poems. Maud's technique is to provide a working 'rephrasement' of each poem with his own bracketed interpolations so that one gets a clear sense of the clear sense he finds in the poem. Acknowledging that 'one grits one's teeth as though on a roundabout, holding on as meanings of lesser purchase are thrown off by centrifugal force,' Maud sometimes desperately clings, with what he describes as 'varying degrees of hesitancy and bravado,' to the central meaning, settling for readings that dismiss inconvenient complications.

This is a work by an especially sensitive and sensible reader who understands from a lifetime of attention to Thomas's poetry that any explication must have its limitations. Those of us who have depended upon Maud's earlier critical and editorial contributions to Thomas's poetry will be grateful for the wealth of useful information in his latest contribution. Thomas's 'old words' have here received expert attention.