The sun roars at the prayer’s end.

BALLAD OF THE LONG-LEGGED BAIT

The bows glided down, and the coast

Blackened with birds took a last look

At his thrashing hair and whale-blue eye;

The trodden town rang its cobbles for luck.

Then goodbye to the fishermanned

Boat with its anchor free and fast

As a bird hooking over the sea,

High and dry by the top of the mast,

Whispered the affectionate sand

And the bulwarks of the dazzled quay.

For my sake sail, and never look back,

Said the looking land.

Sails drank the wind, and white as milk

He sped into the drinking dark;

The sun shipwrecked west on a pearl

And the moon swam out of its hulk.

Funnels and masts went by in a whirl.

Goodbye to the man on the sea-legged deck

To the gold gut that sings on his reel

To the bait that stalked out of the sack,

For we saw him throw to the swift flood

A girl alive with his hooks through her lips;

All the fishes were rayed in blood,

Said the dwindling ships.

Goodbye to chimneys and funnels,

Old wives that spin in the smoke,

He was blind to the eyes of candles

In the praying windows of waves

But heard his bait buck in the wake

And tussle in a shoal of loves.

Now cast down your rod, for the whole

Of the sea is hilly with whales,

She longs among horses and angels,

The rainbow-fish bend in her joys,

Floated the lost cathedral

Chimes of the rocked buoys.

Where the anchor rode like a gull

Miles over the moonstruck boat

A squall of birds bellowed and fell,

A cloud blew the rain from its throat;

He saw the storm smoke out to kill

With fuming bows and ram of ice,

Fire on starlight, rake Jesu’s stream;

And nothing shone on the water’s face

But the oil and bubble of the moon,

Plunging and piercing in his course

The lured fish under the foam

Witnessed with a kiss.

Whales in the wake like capes and Alps

Quaked the sick sea and snouted deep,

Deep the great bushed bait with raining lips

Slipped the fins of those humpbacked tons

And fled their love in a weaving dip.

Oh, Jericho was falling in their lungs!

She nipped and dived in the nick of love,

Spun on a spout like a long-legged ball

Till every beast blared down in a swerve

Till every turtle crushed from his shell

Till every bone in the rushing grave

Rose and crowed and fell!

Good luck to the hand on the rod,

There is thunder under its thumbs;

Gold gut is a lightning thread,

His fiery reel sings off its flames,

The whirled boat in the burn of his blood

Is crying from nets to knives,

Oh the shearwater birds and their boatsized brood

Oh the bulls of Biscay and their calves

Are making under the green, laid veil

The long-legged beautiful bait their wives.

Break the black news and paint on a sail

Huge weddings in the waves,

Over the wakeward-flashing spray

Over the gardens of the floor

Clash out the mounting dolphin’s day,

My mast is a bell-spire,

Strike and smoothe, for my decks are drums,

Sing through the water-spoken prow

The octopus walking into her limbs

The polar eagle with his tread of snow.

From salt-lipped beak to the kick of the stern

Sing how the seal has kissed her dead!

The long, laid minute’s bride drifts on

Old in her cruel bed.

Over the graveyard in the water

Mountains and galleries beneath

Nightingale and hyena

Rejoicing for that drifting death

Sing and howl through sand and anemone

Valley and Sahara in a shell,

Oh all the wanting flesh his enemy

Thrown to the sea in the shell of a girl

Is old as water and plain as an eel;

Always goodbye to the long-legged bread

Scattered in the paths of his heels

For the salty birds fluttered and fed

And the tall grains foamed in their bills;

Always goodbye to the fires of the face,

For the crab-backed dead on the sea-bed rose

And scuttled over her eyes,

The blind, clawed stare is cold as sleet.

The tempter under the eyelid

Who shows to the selves asleep

Mast-high moon-white women naked

Walking in wishes and lovely for shame

Is dumb and gone with his flame of brides.

Susanna’s drowned in the bearded stream

And no-one stirs at Sheba’s side

But the hungry kings of the tides;

Sin who had a woman’s shape Sleeps till

Silence blows on a cloud

And all the lifted waters walk and leap.

Lucifer that bird’s dropping

Out of the sides of the north

Has melted away and is lost

Is always lost in her vaulted breath,

Venus lies star-struck in her wound

And the sensual ruins make

Seasons over the liquid world,

White springs in the dark,

Always goodbye, cried the voices through the shell,

Goodbye always for the flesh is cast

And the fisherman winds his reel

With no more desire than a ghost.

Always good luck, praised the finned in the feather

Bird after dark and the laughing fish

As the sails drank up the hail of thunder

And the long-tailed lightning lit his catch.

The boat swims into the six-year weather,

A wind throws a shadow and it freezes fast.

See what the gold gut drags from under

Mountains and galleries to the crest!

See what clings to hair and skull

As the boat skims on with drinking wings!

The statues of great rain stand still,

And the flakes fall like hills.

Sing and strike his heavy haul

Toppling up the boatside in a snow of light!

His decks are drenched with miracles.

Oh miracle of fishes! The long dead bite!

Out of the urn the size of a man

Out of the room the weight of his trouble

Out of the house that holds a town

In the continent of a fossil

One by one in dust and shawl,

Dry as echoes and insect-faced,

His fathers cling to the hand of the girl

And the dead hand leads the past,

Leads them as children and as air

Onto the blindly tossing tops;

The centuries throw back their hair

And the old men sing from newborn lips:

Time is bearing another son.

Kill Time! She turns in her pain!

The oak is felled in the acorn

And the hawk in the egg kills the wren.

He who blew the great fire in

And died on a hiss of flames

Or walked on the earth in the evening

Counting the denials of the grains

Clings to her drifting hair, and climbs;

And he who taught their lips to sing

Weeps like the risen sun among

The liquid choirs of his tribes.

The rod bends low, divining land,

And through the sundered water crawls

A garden holding to her hand

With birds and animals

With men and women and waterfalls

Trees cool and dry in the whirlpool of ships

And stunned and still on the green, laid veil

Sand with legends in its virgin laps

And prophets loud on the burned dunes;

Insects and valleys hold her thighs hard,

Time and places grip her breast bone,

She is breaking with seasons and clouds;

Round her trailed wrist fresh water weaves,

With moving fish and rounded stones

Up and down the greater waves

A separate river breathes and runs;

Strike and sing his catch of fields

For the surge is sown with barley,

The cattle graze on the covered foam,

The hills have footed the waves away,

With wild sea fillies and soaking bridles

With salty colts and gales in their limbs

All the horses of his haul of miracles

Gallop through the arched, green farms,

Trot and gallop with gulls upon them

And thunderbolts in their manes.

O Rome and Sodom Tomorrow and London

The country tide is cobbled with towns,

And steeples pierce the cloud on her shoulder

And the streets that the fisherman combed

When his long-legged flesh was a wind on fire

And his loin was a hunting flame

Coil from the thoroughfares of her hair

And terribly lead him home alive

Lead her prodigal home to his terror,

The furious ox-killing house of love.

Down, down, down, under the ground,

Under the floating villages,

Turns the moon-chained and water-wound

Metropolis of fishes,

There is nothing left of the sea but its sound,

Under the earth the loud sea walks,

In deathbeds of orchards the boat dies down

And the bait is drowned among hayricks,

Land, land, land, nothing remains

Of the pacing, famous sea but its speech,

And into its talkative seven tombs

The anchor dives through the floors of a church.

Goodbye, good luck, struck the sun and the moon,

To the fisherman lost on the land.

He stands alone at the door of his home,

With his long-legged heart in his hand.

HOLY SPRING

O

Out of a bed of love

When that immortal hospital made one more move to soothe

The cureless counted body,

And ruin and his causes

Over the barbed and shooting sea assumed an army

And swept into our wounds and houses,

I climb to greet the war in which I have no heart but only

That one dark I owe my light,

Call for confessor and wiser mirror but there is none

To glow after the god stoning night

And I am struck as lonely as a holy maker by the sun.

No

Praise that the spring time is all

Gabriel and radiant shrubbery as the morning grows joyful

Out of the woebegone pyre

And the multitude’s sultry tear turns cool on the weeping

wall,

My arising prodigal

Sun the father his quiver full of the infants of pure fire,

But blessed be hail and upheaval

That uncalm still it is sure alone to stand and sing

Alone in the husk of man’s home

And the mother and toppling house of the holy spring,

If only for a last time.

FERN HILL

Now as I was young and easy under the apple boughs

About the lilting house and happy as the grass was green,

The night above the dingle starry,

Time let me hail and climb

Golden in the heydays of his eyes,

And honoured among wagons I was prince of the apple towns

And once below a time I lordly had the trees and leaves

Trail with daisies and barley

Down the rivers of the windfall light.

And as I was green and carefree, famous among the barns

About the happy yard and singing as the farm was home,

In the sun that is young once only,

Time let me play and be

Golden in the mercy of his means,

And green and golden I was huntsman and herdsman, the

calves

Sang to my horn, the foxes on the hills barked clear and cold,

And the sabbath rang slowly

In the pebbles of the holy streams.

All the sun long it was running, it was lovely, the hay

Fields high as the house, the tunes from the chimneys, it

was air

And playing, lovely and watery

And fire green as grass.

And nightly under the simple stars

As I rode to sleep the owls were bearing the farm away,

All the moon long I heard, blessed among stables, the night

jars

Flying with the ricks, and the horses

Flashing into the dark.

And then to awake, and the farm, like a wanderer white

With the dew, come back, the cock on his shoulder: it was all

Shining, it was Adam and maiden,

The sky gathered again

And the sun grew round that very day.

So it must have been after the birth of the simple light

In the first, spinning place, the spellbound horses walking

warm

Out of the whinnying green stable

On to the fields of praise.

And honoured among foxes and pheasants by the gay house

Under the new made clouds and happy as the heart was long,

In the sun born over and over,

I ran my heedless ways,

My wishes raced through the house high hay

And nothing I cared, at my sky blue trades, that time allows

In all his tuneful turning so few and such morning songs

Before the children green and golden

Follow him out of grace,

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,

In the moon that is always rising,

Nor that riding to sleep

I should hear him fly with the high fields

And wake to the farm forever fled from the childless land.

Oh as I was young and easy in the mercy of his means,

Time held me green and dying

Though I sang in my chains like the sea.

IN COUNTRY SLEEP

I

Never and never, my girl riding far and near

In the land of the hearthstone tales, and spelled asleep,

Fear or believe that the wolf in a sheepwhite hood

Loping and bleating roughly and blithely shall leap,

My dear, my dear,

Out of a lair in the flocked leaves in the dew dipped year

To eat your heart in the house in the rosy wood.

Sleep, good, for ever, slow and deep, spelled rare and wise,

My girl ranging the night in the rose and shire

Of the hobnail tales: no gooseherd or swine will turn

Into a homestall king or hamlet of fire

And prince of ice

To court the honeyed heart from your side before sunrise

In a spinney of ringed boys and ganders, spike and burn,

Nor the innocent lie in the rooting dingle wooed

And staved, and riven among plumes my rider weep.

From the broomed witch’s spume you are shielded by fern

And flower of country sleep and the greenwood keep.

Lie fast and soothed,

Safe be and smooth from the bellows of the rushy brood.

Never, my girl, until tolled to sleep by the stern

Bell believe or fear that the rustic shade or spell

Shall harrow and snow the blood while you ride wide and near,

For who unmanningly haunts the mountain ravened eaves

Or skulks in the dell moon but moonshine echoing clear

From the starred well?

A hill touches an angel! Out of a saint’s cell

The nightbird lauds through nunneries and domes of leaves

Her robin breasted tree, three Marys in the rays.

Sanctum sanctorum the animal eye of the wood

In the rain telling its beads, and the gravest ghost

The owl at its knelling. Fox and holt kneel before blood.

Now the tales praise

The star rise at pasture and nightlong the fables graze

On the lord’s table of the bowing grass. Fear most

For ever of all not the wolf in his baaing hood

Nor the tusked prince, in the ruttish farm, at the rind

And mire of love, but the Thief as meek as the dew.

The country is holy. O bide in that country kind,

Know the green good,

Under the prayer wheeling moon in the rosy wood

Be shielded by chant and flower and gay may you

Lie in grace. Sleep spelled at rest in the lowly house

In the squirrel nimble grove, under linen and thatch

And star: held and blessed, though you scour the high four

Winds, from the dousing shade and the roarer at the latch,

Cool in your vows.

Yet out of the beaked, web dark and the pouncing boughs

Be you sure the Thief will seek a way sly and sure

And sly as snow and meek as dew blown to the thorn,

This night and each vast night until the stern bell talks

In the tower and tolls to sleep over the stalls

Of the hearthstone tales my own, last love; and the soul walks

The waters shorn.

This night and each night since the falling star you were born,

Ever and ever he finds a way, as the snow falls,

As the rain falls, hail on the fleece, as the vale mist rides

Through the haygold stalls, as the dew falls on the wind-

Milled dust of the apple tree and the pounded islands

Of the morning leaves, as the star falls, as the winged

Apple seed glides,

And falls, and flowers in the yawning wound at our sides,

As the world falls, silent as the cyclone of silence.

II

Night and the reindeer on the clouds above the haycocks

And the wings of the great roc ribboned for the fair!

The leaping saga of prayer! And high, there, on the hare-

Heeled winds the rooks

Cawing from their black bethels soaring, the holy books

Of birds! Among the cocks like fire the red fox

Burning! Night and the vein of birds in the winged, sloe wrist

Of the wood! Pastoral beat of blood through the laced leaves!

The stream from the priest black wristed spinney and sleeves

Of thistling frost

Of the nightingale’s din and tale! The upgiven ghost

Of the dingle torn to singing and the surpliced

Hill of cypresses! The din and tale in the skimmed

Yard of the buttermilk rain on the pail! The sermon

Of blood! The bird loud vein! The saga from mermen

To seraphim

Leaping! The gospel rooks! All tell, this night, of him

Who comes as red as the fox and sly as the heeled wind.

Illumination of music! the lulled black backed

Gull, on the wave with sand in its eyes! And the foal moves

Through the shaken greensward lake, silent, on moonshod hooves,

In the winds’ wakes.

Music of elements, that a miracle makes!

Earth, air, water, fire, singing into the white act,

The haygold haired, my love asleep, and the rift blue

Eyed, in the haloed house, in her rareness and hilly

High riding, held and blessed and true, and so stilly

Lying the sky

Might cross its planets, the bell weep, night gather her eyes,

The Thief fall on the dead like the willy-nilly dew,

Only for the turning of the earth in her holy

Heart! Slyly, slowly, hearing the wound in her side go

Round the sun, he comes to my love like the designed snow,

And truly he

Flows to the strand of flowers like the dew’s ruly sea,

And surely he sails like the ship shape clouds. Oh he

Comes designed to my love to steal not her tide raking

Wound, nor her riding thigh, nor her eyes, nor kindled hair,

But her faith that each vast night and the saga of prayer

He comes to take

Her faith that this last night for his unsacred sake

He comes to leave her in the lawless sun awaking

Naked and forsaken to grieve he will not come.

Ever and ever by all your vows believe and fear

My dear this night he comes and night without end my dear

Since you were born:

And you shall wake, from country sleep, this dawn and each first dawn,

Your faith as deathless as the outcry of the ruled sun.

OVER SIR JOHN’S HILL

Over Sir John’s hill,

The hawk on fire hangs still;

In a hoisted cloud, at drop of dusk, he pulls to his claws

And gallows, up the rays of his eyes the small birds of the bay

And the shrill child’s play

Wars

Of the sparrows such who swansing, dusk, in wrangling hedges.

And blithely they squawk

To fiery tyburn over the wrestle of elms until

The flash the noosed hawk

Crashes, and slowly the fishing holy stalking heron

In the river Towy below bows his tilted headstone.

Flash, and the plumes crack,

And a black cap of jack-

Daws Sir John’s just hill dons, and again the gulled birds hare

To the hawk on fire, the halter height, over Towy’s fins,

In a whack of wind.

There

Where the elegiac fisherbird stabs and paddles

In the pebbly dab-filled

Shallow and sedge, and ‘dilly dilly,’ calls the loft hawk,

‘Come and be killed,’

I open the leaves of the water at a passage

Of psalms and shadows among the pincered sandcrabs prancing

And read, in a shell,

Death clear as a buoy’s bell:

All praise of the hawk on fire in hawk-eyed dusk be sung,

When his viperish fuse hangs looped with flames under the brand

Wing, and blest shall

Young

Green chickens of the bay and bushes cluck, ‘dilly dilly,

Come let us die.’

We grieve as the blithe birds, never again, leave shingle and elm,

The heron and I,

I young Aesop fabling to the near night by the dingle

Of eels, saint heron hymning in the shell-hung distant

Crystal harbour vale

Where the sea cobbles sail,

And wharves of water where the walls dance and the white cranes stilt.

It is the heron and I, under judging Sir John’s elmed

Hill, tell-tale the knelled

Guilt

Of the led-astray birds whom God, for their breast of whistles,

Have mercy on,

God in his whirlwind silence save, who marks the sparrows hail,

For their souls’ song.

Now the heron grieves in the weeded verge. Through windows

Of dusk and water I see the tilting whispering

Heron, mirrored, go,

As the snapt feathers snow,

Fishing in the tear of the Towy. Only a hoot owl

Hollows, a grassblade blown in cupped hands, in the looted elms,

And no green cocks or hens

Shout

Now on Sir John’s hill. The heron, ankling the scaly

Lowlands of the waves,

Makes all the music; and I who hear the tune of the slow,

Wear-willow river, grave,

Before the lunge of the night, the notes on this time-shaken

Stone for the sake of the souls of the slain birds sailing.

POEM ON HIS BIRTHDAY

In the mustardseed sun,

By full tilt river and switchback sea

Where the cormorants scud,

In his house on stilts high among beaks

And palavers of birds

This sandgrain day in the bent bay’s grave

He celebrates and spurns

His driftwood thirty-fifth wind turned age;

Herons spire and spear.

Under and round him go

Flounders, gulls, on their cold, dying trails,

Doing what they are told,

Curlews aloud in the congered waves

Work at their ways to death,

And the rhymer in the long tongued room,

Who tolls his birthday bell,

Toils towards the ambush of his wounds;

Herons, steeple stemmed, bless.

In the thistledown fall,

He sings towards anguish; finches fly

In the claw tracks of hawks

On a seizing sky; small fishes glide

Through wynds and shells of drowned

Ship towns to pastures of otters. He

In his slant, racking house

And the hewn coils of his trade perceives

Herons walk in their shroud,

The livelong river’s robe

Of minnows wreathing around their prayer;

And far at sea he knows,

Who slaves to his crouched, eternal end

Under a serpent cloud,

Dolphins dive in their turnturtle dust,

The rippled seals streak down

To kill and their own tide daubing blood

Slides good in the sleek mouth.

In a cavernous, swung

Wave’s silence, wept white angelus knells.

Thirty-five bells sing struck

On skull and scar where his loves lie wrecked,

Steered by the falling stars.

And tomorrow weeps in a blind cage

Terror will rage apart

Before chains break to a hammer flame

And love unbolts the dark

And freely he goes lost

In the unknown, famous light of great

And fabulous, dear God.

Dark is a way and light is a place,

Heaven that never was

Nor will be ever is always true,

And, in that brambled void,

Plenty as blackberries in the woods

The dead grow for His joy.

There he might wander bare

With the spirits of the horseshoe bay

Or the stars’ seashore dead,

Marrow of eagles, the roots of whales

And wishbones of wild geese,

With blessed, unborn God and His Ghost,

And every soul His priest,

Gulled and chanter in young Heaven’s fold

Be at cloud quaking peace,

But dark is a long way.

He, on the earth of the night, alone

With all the living, prays,

Who knows the rocketing wind will blow

The bones out of the hills,

And the scythed boulders bleed, and the last

Rage shattered waters kick

Masts and fishes to the still quick stars,

Faithlessly unto Him

Who is the light of old

And air shaped Heaven where souls grow wild

As horses in the foam:

Oh, let me midlife mourn by the shrined

And druid herons’ vows

The voyage to ruin I must run,

Dawn ships clouted aground,

Yet, though I cry with tumbledown tongue,

Count my blessings aloud:

Four elements and five

Senses, and man a spirit in love

Tangling through this spun slime

To his nimbus bell cool kingdom come

And the lost, moonshine domes,

And the sea that hides his secret selves

Deep in its black, base bones,

Lulling of spheres in the seashell flesh,

And this last blessing most,

That the closer I move

To death, one man through his sundered hulks,

The louder the sun blooms

And the tusked, ramshackling sea exults;

And every wave of the way

And gale I tackle, the whole world then

With more triumphant faith

Than ever was since the world was said

Spins its morning of praise,

I hear the bouncing hills

Grow larked and greener at berry brown

Fall and the dew larks sing

Taller this thunderclap spring, and how

More spanned with angels ride

The mansouled fiery islands! Oh,

Holier then their eyes,

And my shining men no more alone

As I sail out to die.

LAMENT

When I was a windy boy and a bit

And the black spit of the chapel fold,

(Sighed the old ram rod, dying of women),

I tiptoed shy in the gooseberry wood,

The rude owl cried like a telltale tit,

I skipped in a blush as the big girls rolled

Ninepin down on the donkeys’ common,

And on seesaw sunday nights I wooed

Whoever I would with my wicked eyes,

The whole of the moon I could love and leave

All the green leaved little weddings’ wives

In the coal black bush and let them grieve.

When I was a gusty man and a half

And the black beast of the beetles’ pews,

(Sighed the old ram rod, dying of bitches),

Not a boy and a bit in the wick-

Dipping moon and drunk as a new dropped calf,

I whistled all night in the twisted flues,

Midwives grew in the midnight ditches,

And the sizzling beds of the town cried, Quick!—

Whenever I dove in a breast high shoal,

Wherever I ramped in the clover quilts,

Whatsoever I did in the coal-

Black night, I left my quivering prints.

When I was a man you could call a man

And the black cross of the holy house,

(Sighed the old ram rod, dying of welcome),

Brandy and ripe in my bright, bass prime,

No springtailed tom in the red hot town

With every simmering woman his mouse

But a hillocky bull in the swelter

Of summer come in his great good time

To the sultry, biding herds, I said,

Oh, time enough when the blood creeps cold,

And I lie down but to sleep in bed,

For my sulking, skulking, coal black soul!

When I was a half of the man I was

And serve me right as the preachers warn,

(Sighed the old ram rod, dying of downfall),

No flailing calf or cat in a flame

Or hickory bull in milky grass

But a black sheep with a crumpled horn,

At last the soul from its foul mousehole

Slunk pouting out when the limp time came;

And I gave my soul a blind, slashed eye,

Gristle and rind, and a roarer’s life,

And I shoved it into the coal black sky

To find a woman’s soul for a wife.

Now I am a man no more no more

And a black reward for a roaring life,

(Sighed the old ram rod, dying of strangers),

Tidy and cursed in my dove cooed room

I lie down thin and hear the good bells jaw—

For, oh, my soul found a sunday wife

In the coal black sky and she bore angels!

Harpies around me out of her womb!

Chastity prays for me, piety sings,

Innocence sweetens my last black breath,

Modesty hides my thighs in her wings,

And all the deadly virtues plague my death!

IN THE WHITE GIANT’S THIGH

Through throats where many rivers meet, the curlews cry,

Under the conceiving moon, on the high chalk hill,

And there this night I walk in the white giant’s thigh

Where barren as boulders women lie longing still

To labour and love though they lay down long ago.

Through throats where many rivers meet, the women pray,

Pleading in the waded bay for the seed to flow

Though the names on their weed grown stones are rained away,

And alone in the night’s eternal, curving act

They yearn with tongues of curlews for the unconceived

And immemorial sons of the cudgelling, hacked

Hill. Who once in gooseskin winter loved all ice leaved

In the courters’ lanes, or twined in the ox roasting sun

In the wains tonned so high that the wisps of the hay

Clung to the pitching clouds, or gay with anyone

Young as they in the after milking moonlight lay

Under the lighted shapes of faith and their moonshade

Petticoats galed high, or shy with the rough riding boys,

Now clasp me to their grains in the gigantic glade,

Who once, green countries since, were a hedgerow of joys.

Time by, their dust was flesh the swineherd rooted sly,

Flared in the reek of the wiving sty with the rush

Light of his thighs, spreadeagle to the dunghill sky,

Or with their orchard man in the core of the sun’s bush

Rough as cows’ tongues and thrashed with brambles their buttermilk

Manes, under his quenchless summer barbed gold to the bone,

Or rippling soft in the spinney moon as the silk

And ducked and draked white lake that harps to a hail stone.

Who once were a bloom of wayside brides in the hawed house

And heard the lewd, wooed field flow to the coming frost,

The scurrying, furred small friars squeal, in the dowse

Of day, in the thistle aisles, till the white owl crossed

Their breast, the vaulting does roister, the horned bucks climb

Quick in the wood at love, where a torch of foxes foams,

All birds and beasts of the linked night uproar and chime

And the mole snout blunt under his pilgrimage of domes,

Or, butter fat goosegirls, bounced in a gambo bed,

Their breasts full of honey, under their gander king

Trounced by his wings in the hissing shippen, long dead

And gone that barley dark where their clogs danced in the spring,

And their firefly hairpins flew, and the ricks ran round—

(But nothing bore, no mouthing babe to the veined hives

Hugged, and barren and bare on Mother Goose’s ground

They with the simple Jacks were a boulder of wives)—

Now curlew cry me down to kiss the mouths of their dust.

The dust of their kettles and clocks swings to and fro

Where the hay rides now or the bracken kitchens rust

As the arc of the billhooks that flashed the hedges low

And cut the birds’ boughs that the minstrel sap ran red.

They from houses where the harvest kneels, hold me hard,

Who heard the tall bell sail down the Sundays of the dead

And the rain wring out its tongues on the faded yard,

Teach me the love that is evergreen after the fall leaved

Grave, after Beloved on the grass gulfed cross is scrubbed

Off by the sun and Daughters no longer grieved

Save by their long desirers in the fox cubbed

Streets or hungering in the crumbled wood: to these

Hale dead and deathless do the women of the hill

Love forever meridian through the courters’ trees

And the daughters of darkness flame like Fawkes fires still.

ELEGY

Too proud to die; broken and blind he died

The darkest way, and did not turn away,

A cold kind man brave in his narrow pride

On that darkest day. Oh, forever may

He lie lightly, at last, on the last, crossed

Hill, under the grass, in love, and there grow

Young among the long flocks, and never lie lost

Or still all the numberless days of his death, though

Above all he longed for his mother’s breast

Which was rest and dust, and in the kind ground

The darkest justice of death, blind and unblessed.

Let him find no rest but be fathered and found,

I prayed in the crouching room, by his blind bed,

In the muted house, one minute before

Noon, and night, and light. The rivers of the dead

Veined his poor hand I held, and I saw

Through his unseeing eyes to the roots of the sea.

[An old tormented man three-quarters blind,

I am not too proud to cry that He and he

Will never never go out of my mind.

All his bones crying, and poor in all but pain,

Being innocent, he dreaded that he died

Hating his God, but what he was was plain:

An old kind man brave in his burning pride.

The sticks of the house were his; his books he owned.

Even as a baby he had never cried;

Nor did he now, save to his secret wound.

Out of his eyes I saw the last light glide.

Here among the light of the lording sky

An old blind man is with me where I go

Walking in the meadows of his son’s eye

On whom a world of ills came down like snow.

He cried as he died, fearing at last the spheres’

Last sound, the world going out without a breath:

Too proud to cry, too frail to check the tears,

And caught between two nights, blindness and death.

O deepest wound of all that he should die

On that darkest day. Oh, he could hide

The tears out of his eyes, too proud to cry.

Until I die he will not leave my side.]

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Vernon Watkins’ Note on “Elegy”

This unfinished Elegy of Dylan Thomas was given the title “Elegy” in the latest version of the poem after the provisional titles “The Darkest Way” or “Too Proud to Die” or “True Death” had been used in preparatory drafts. Among his papers he left sixty pages of manuscript work towards the poem, including this note:—

(1)	Although he was too proud to die, he did die, blind, in the most agonizing way but he did not flinch from death & was brave in his pride.
(2)	In his innocence, if thinking he was God-hating, he never knew that what he was was: an old kind man in his burning pride.
(3)	Now he will not leave my side, though he is dead.
(4)	His mother said that as a baby he never cried; nor did he, as an old man; he just cried to his secret wound if his blindness, never aloud.

The rest of the manuscript work consists of phrases, lines, couplets, and line-endings, and transcripts of the poem in various degrees of completeness. The two more complete versions, which are clearly the latest, are both rhymed in quatrains. One, with no title, has no division into verses, and the second, with the title “Elegy,” is divided into verses of three lines. This, to me, seems to be the latest version of all, and seems to hold the final form the poem was to take. The poem extends to the seventeenth line, ending “to the roots of the sea,” after which there is a line which is deleted.

The extension of the poem has been built up from the manuscript’s notes. The lines are all found there, except that two or three have been adjusted to fit the rhyming scheme. “Breath” was an isolated marginal word which I have used in line thirty-four; and “plain,” which ends line twenty-three, has been added to “was” without justification from the manuscript. In the third line I have chosen “narrow pride” as against “burning pride” although “burning” occurs more often than “narrow” in the transcripts; but it was “narrow” in that line he quoted to me from memory when I last saw him.

Of the added lines sixteen are exactly as Dylan Thomas wrote them, and the remainder are altered only to the extent of an inversion of one or two words. Their order might well have been different. The poem might also have been made much longer. It recalls the earlier poem, also written for his father: “Do not go gentle into that good night”; but it is clear that in this last poem Dylan Thomas was attempting something even more immediate and more difficult.

VERNON WATKINS, 1956

IN COUNTRY HEAVEN

Always when he, in country heaven,

(Whom my heart hears),

Crosses the breast of the praising East, and kneels,

Humble in all his planets,

And weeps on the abasing hill,

Then in the delight and grove of beasts and birds

And the canonized valley

Where the dewfall stars sing grazing still

And the angels whirr like pheasants

Through naves of leaves,

Light and his tears glide down together

(O hand in hand)

From the country eyes, salt and sun, star and woe

Down the cheek bones and whinnying

Downs into the low browsing dark.

Housed in hamlets of heaven swing the loft lamps,

In the black buried spinneys

Bushes and owls blow out like candles,

And seraphic fields of shepherds

Fade with their rose–

White, God’s bright, flocks, the belled lambs leaping,

(His gentle kind);

The shooting star hawk statued blind in a cloud

Over the blackamoor shires

Hears the belfries and the cobbles

Of the twelve apostles’ towns ring in his night;

And the long fox like fire

Prowls flaming among the cockerels

In the farms of heaven’s keeping,

But they sleep sound.

For the fifth element is pity,

(Pity for death)….

_____________________

Daniel Jones’ note on “In Country Heaven”

In his radio broadcast of 25th September 1950 Thomas spoke of a long “poem in preparation.” Three sections of this had been completed with the titles: “In Country Sleep,” “Over Sir John’s Hill” and “In the White Giant’s Thigh.” The first two, dating from 1947 and 1949 had already been printed, while the last was still in manuscript. He disclosed the “grand and simple” plan of the long poem: “The poem is to be called “In Country Heaven.” The godhead, the author, the milkyway farmer, the first cause, architect, lamp-lighter, quintessence, the beginning Word, the anthropomorphic bowlerout and blackballer, the stuff of all men, scapegoat, martyr, maker, woe-bearer—He, on top of a hill in heaven, weeps whenever, outside that state of being called his country, one of his worlds drops dead, vanishes screaming, shrivels, explodes, murders itself. And, when he weeps, Light and his tears glide down together, hand in hand. So, at the beginning of the projected poem, he weeps, and Country Heaven is suddenly dark. Bushes and owls blow out like candles. And the countrymen of heaven crouch all together under the hedges and, among themselves in the tear-salt darkness, surmise which world, which star, which of their late, turning homes in the skies has gone for ever.