“I Build My Bellowing Ark”: Wounded Speech in George Herbert and Dylan Thomas

I take the first part of my title from Dylan Thomas’s “Author’s Prologue” to his Collected Poems, 1934-1952. A short passage from the “Prologue,” alive with the sounds of the Welsh landscape, explores the “ark” of Thomas’s poetry, both as refuge and rage, wonder and wounding. In this passage, lyric intensity pervades Thomas’s language, as it traces the visionary movement from the local to the universal, from the enchantments of Wales to the harsh modern world, and back again. The imperative first word (“Look”) calls attention to the magnitude of a vision unyielding to conventional religious language:

        Look:I build my bellowing arkTo the best of my loveAs the flood begins,Out of the fountainheadOf fear, rage red, manalive,Molten and mountainous to streamOver the wound asleepSheep white hollow farmsTo Wales in my arms.

(ll. 43-52)¹

Toward the close of the Prologue, the poet announces that he will “ride out alone, and then, / Under the stars of Wales, / Cry, Multitudes of arks!” Part of his struggle, then, is with language, with the limitations of knowing and saying, of tongued-tied and groping attempts to find – “spell” – religious experience. This is the point at which reading Dylan Thomas’s poetry can be another way of “locating” George Herbert’s legacy.

For both Herbert and Thomas, religious poetry often takes the form of doubts about the efficacy as well as propriety of words to accomplish the tasks of authentic representation and devotion. Part of the force of their religious poetry derives from the exposures of vision and assent (and ascent); from exaltation and disappointment in religious experience; from the acute awareness of frailty, blindness, and dullness of understanding; ultimately, from the pressure of love, for humankind and for God. Herbert knows something about language pressed to its limits, not only about the charms and knots of expressiveness, but also about the problem of inarticulateness: “When my devotions could not pierce / Thy silent eares; / Then was my heart broken, as was my verse,” Herbert writes in “Deniall” (ll. 1-3).² While Herbert’s poetry is, ultimately, a path to God, it meets with unpredictable encounters in “The Church.”

Thomas’s poetry is also a passage, a channel, even a charm – to otherworldly realities. It confronts the problems of time and eternity, nature and God, though with an uneasy reference to conventional religious formulations, often but not exclusively Christian. Yet Christian imagery, symbol, and language inform much of Thomas’s best poetry, as in the “womb” poem “In the beginning”: “In the beginning was the word, the word / That from the solid bases of the light / Abstracted all the letters of the void” (ll. 19-21). In “This Bread I Break,” Thomas reworks the language of sacrament to describe erotic intimacy. Even in “Fern Hill,” perhaps Thomas’s most evocative poem, a sacramental sense lies hidden in the Welsh landscape: “And the sabbath rang slowly / In the pebbles of the holy streams” (ll. 18-19); later in the poem, the sacramental evocations become incantatory: “Nothing I cared, in the lamb white days, that time would / take me / Up to the swallow thronged loft by the shadow of my hand” (ll. 50-52). God and creation, word and sacrament, then, invigorate Thomas’s “biblical rhythm.”³ In this essay, I argue that the poetry of Herbert and Thomas, in particular, their shaped and patterned poems, holds attention for a new “seeing” through negotiating the radical adjustments of language resulting from intense religious experience. In important ways, then, the imperative “Look,” as announced in Thomas’s “Author’s Prologue,” remains imperative as a perceptual demand in the most searching religious poetry of both poets.

As a religious poet, Herbert turned to puzzles, riddles, parables, allegories, and fables to test the limits of the word. Poems such as “Paradise,” “Jesu,” and “Love-joy,” while not as explicitly “shaped” as “The Altar,” or “Easter wings,” demonstrate his tendency to play with language in an effort to discover its proper shape and its ultimate...