A Toad's Favo(u)rite Poem in October

Dylan Thomas is one of my all-time favourite poets. With more than half his collected work written during his late teens, he was a brilliantly gifted man of high passion and intensity, and this is clearly evident in his poetry. His language sings, his imagery is uniquely individual and his mastery of grammatical structure leaves me astounded every time I read one of his famous poems aloud. He described his technique in a letter:
Thomas describes his technique in a letter: "I make one image—though 'make' is not the right word; I let, perhaps, an image be 'made' emotionally in me and then apply to it what intellectual & critical forces I possess—let it breed another, let that image contradict the first, make, of the third image bred out of the other two together, a fourth contradictory image, and let them all, within my imposed formal limits, conflict."

bbc.co.uk

There are several poems I could have chosen for this post, among them Fern Hill and And death shall have no dominion, but I have selected my favourite favourite: Poem in October, in which he contemplates his October 27 birthday. It was first published in Deaths and Entrances in 1946. The complete poem can be read on the Poetry Foundation page, linked above, or you may like to listen to it being read by Dylan Thomas in the audio clip below, while I share a few excerpts here.

The poem begins with this stanza:

It was my thirtieth year to heaven

Woke to my hearing from harbour and neighbour wood   

      And the mussel pooled and the heron

                  Priested shore

            The morning beckon

With water praying and call of seagull and rook

And the knock of sailing boats on the net webbed wall   

            Myself to set foot

                  That second

      In the still sleeping town and set forth.

 What strikes me, is the way the poet has introduced the reader to the setting of the poem through the sense of sound, rather than sight: 'Woke to hearing'. I also admire the turn of phrase he employs in the lines: 'And the mussel pooled and the heron/ Priested shore' where 'mussel pooled' and 'heron priested' become the descriptives of the 'shore'. The link between the heron as priest and the water praying infuses the whole scene with a sense of natural spirituality. 

Try reading these lines aloud to yourself (take a deep breath for all the run-on lines); feel the words and sounds roll from your lips and sing in your ears.

      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 were fond climates and sweet singers suddenly   

Come in the morning where I wandered and listened   

            To the rain wringing

                  Wind blow cold

      In the wood faraway under me.

This, to me, is what poetry should be:

And I saw in the turning so clearly a child’s

Forgotten mornings when he walked with his mother   

            Through the parables

                  Of sun light

      And the legends of the green chapels

      And the twice told fields of infancy

That his tears burned my cheeks and his heart moved in mine.   

      These were the woods the river and sea

                  Where a boy

            In the listening

Summertime of the dead whispered the truth of his joy   

To the trees and the stones and the fish in the tide.