Crafty Dylan and the Altarwise Sonnets: ‘I build a flying tower and I pull it down’

DON MCKAY Crafty Dylan and the Altarwise Sonnets: 'I build a flying tower and I pull it down' One interesting entrance to the question of Dylan Thomas's craftsmanship is offered by the place he tends to assume, or be assigned, among modem poets. Donald Davie, in Thomas Hardy and British Poetry, finds 'tragic significance to the fact that Hardy is said to have been Dylan Thomas' favourite poet, whereas Yeats was his chosen master:' This tragedy evidently lies in what Davie perceives to be the abandonment of temporality by poets like Thomas and his friend Vernon Watkins for the eternal, atemporal, and mythic. Davie is referring to Vernon Watkins's comment, in his introduction to Thomas's letters to him, that Dylan 'understood ... why I could never write a poem dominated by time, as Hardy could: This, Watkins goes on, 'was also true of Dylan, though some critics have mistakenly thought to find such poems in his work. It illustrates our affinity on a deeper level: his poems spoke to me with the voice of metaphysical truth...:' But we might do well to ask again whether the time-bound poems of Hardy are not a stronger conditioner than most have supposed. What is often seenin Thomas as an address to a timeless world of mythic patternis more appropriately construed as the reverse: a pulling of such still structures into the flux of temporality. Thomas's work resembles Hardy's in that it frequently brings the mechanism of the poems to the fore, using fixed stanzas with intricate rhyme and metrical schemes. He experiments with elaborate forms like the sonnet and the villanelle and does not, even in the leisurely later poems, accept the option offree verse from Lawrence and Whitman, with whom he seems to be philosophically in sympathy. Still less can one discover the influence of the vers librists or their descendants, Pound, Eliot, and the imagists. Madeness is an essential part of the character of Thomas's poems, a constant reminder of the poet's presence in the work. The comparison with Hardy is instructive: in the structures of both poets we feel an obvious arbitrariness, revealing a human craftsman using available materials, rather than the inspired recipient of ineluctable design. One thinks of 'Author's Prologue' with the mirror-image rhyme scheme and Thomas's comment to his publisher: 'Why I acrosticked myself like this, don't ask me:' Whatever the reason, one effect of the exercise is to impress readers by flourishing his credentials as a virtuoso technician. One also thinks of the seventy-two UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO QUARTERLY, VOLUM.E 55, NUMBER 4 , SUMMER 1986 lines in 'I, in my intricate image' ending with some variation of the 'L' sound, and the difficulty of reconciling this monotone with the intricacy mentioned in the title. Reading Thomas, as with Hardy, we are generally aware of a craftsman making the poem in time, rather than flying on viewless wings. But itis quite apparent that there is a fundamental dissimilaritybetween Thomas's craftand Hardy's. Whereas Hardy is always homofaber, Thomas is more often homo ludens. Thomas's formal play, his willingness to wear rhetoric as a costume, distinguishes him from Hardy, the 'humbler' craftsman. Donald Davie's image of Hardy as a nineteenth-century engineer constructing a complex, open-faced mechanism holds true in a general way.' Thomas is 'crafty' rather than humble in the control and manipulation of his craft, and the complementary image for him, which I wish to elaborate in the pages which follow, is the trickster. Let me begin by quoting the well-known, flamboyant response Thomas made to a student inquiring about his use of technical devices. I am a painstaking, conscientious, involved, and devious craftsman in words, however unsuccessful the result so often appears, and to whatever wrong uses Imay apply my technical paraphernalia. Iuse everything and anything to make my poems workand move in the direction Iwant them to:old tricks, new tricks, puns, portmanteau-words, paradox, allusion, paronomasia, paragram, catachresis , slang, assonantal rhymes, vowel rhymes, sprungrhythm. Every device there is in language is there to be used if you will. Poets have got to enjoy themselves sometimes, and...