Inspiring Older Readers
Poem in October by Dylan Thomas
I still receive the alumnus magazine from Bangor University – somehow they’ve always managed to track me down despite having moved house pretty frequently – but now it comes as an electronic attachment to email rather than a glossy magazine printed in the duel languages of English and Welsh. I’m always a little bit surprised at the changes that constantly take place there and just how modern it all looks – I know this is PR bumpf but the students do look as if they are attending somewhere that is attached to the social and academic real world. I say this because back in the early 1970s it couldn’t have felt more different – I found Bangor a rather dismal, rainy, run-down place back then and the university felt distinctly out on a limb. I was, however, young and stupid and that may well have had a lot to do with my perception of the place.
One thing that doesn’t ever seem to change very much however is the main arts and humanities library housed in a Grade One listed main building. It remains an ornate mix of Edwardian Gothic and Renaissance architecture and when I see pictures of it I’m struck by how little consideration I gave it back then. Whenever I think back to the time I spent in that place I always see myself seated at a light oak (?) table reading Dylan Thomas’ Poem In October:
Poem In October
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.
My birthday began with the water-
Birds and the birds of the winged trees flying my name
Above the farms and the white horses
And I rose
In rainy autumn
And walked abroad in a shower of all my days.
High tide and the heron dived when I took the road
Over the border
And the gates
Of the town closed as the town awoke.
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.
Pale rain over the dwindling harbour
And over the sea wet church the size of a snail
With its horns through mist and the castle
Brown as owls
But all the gardens
Of spring and summer were blooming in the tall tales
Beyond the border and under the lark full cloud.
There could I marvel
My birthday
Away but the weather turned around.
It turned away from the blithe country
And down the other air and the blue altered sky
Streamed again a wonder of summer
With apples
Pears and red currants
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.
And the mystery
Sang alive
Still in the water and singingbirds.
And there could I marvel my birthday
Away but the weather turned around. And the true
Joy of the long dead child sang burning
In the sun.
It was my thirtieth
Year to heaven stood there then in the summer noon
Though the town below lay leaved with October blood.
O may my heart's truth
Still be sung
On this high hill in a year's turning.
The picture I have in my mind of me reading this is, oddly enough, a still, photographic, colour image; a moment captured in time as a shaft of sunlight fell on the exact spot in which I had chosen to sit. It was, I think, the first time I was aware of the ability of poetry to put the reader into a space outside of time – to provide a perfect moment that had no beginning or end and which flooded my senses with well-being.
I would have been 20 or 21 when this moment happened but it stays with me as a crystal-clear revelation that can be re-conjured every time I read or hear this poem. At the age I was, a 30th birthday seemed a long way distant but I could, even then, understand the notion of surrendering yourself to the sheer magnificence of being alive; of putting aside adult cares and allowing the immediacy and freshness of the way the child sees everything to takeover. Seeing the world as magical and newly-minted isn’t, Thomas tells us, just something for the child because its available to adults if you have the eyes and the heart of a child – even if that is only for the epiphanal moment.
Usually, I’m not a great fan of poems that use the position of words or line lengths to make specific shapes on the page – it strikes me as something that’s usually a tricksy gimmick and is likely to be there to mask the otherwise shallow nature of the content. But in this case Thomas has used the shape-poem format to produce something entirely harmonious to both the content and implicit subject of the verse. The flight of birds he creates on the page mirrors the ‘water- Birds and the birds of the winged trees flying my name’ or the ‘springful of larks in a rolling
Cloud’ but it also speaks to us of the way the years fly away and the migration of the birds as they mark out the passing of time until his and their return to this same place next year.
This poem is Dylan Thomas’ Wordsworthian moment – the surrender to Pantheism and the recognition of the unbroken thread in which ‘the child is the father of the man’; the strongly autobiographical nature of the narrative and the idea of a journey from ‘civilisation’ into nature echoes the themes of The Prelude.
But unlike Wordsworth there is a lyrical intensity, almost a sentimentality about Thomas’ verse that hooks you in emotionally rather than intellectually. I find it impossible, even now all these years on, to read this poem and not find myself conflicted – caught somewhere between the joy of being alive and tears that must accompany the inevitable passage of time and our comparatively short lives.
A truly wonderful poem.
Terry Potter
November 2018