(The first half of this essay is adapted from a lecture given as part of the Dylan Thomas Celebration 2002 at the Dylan Thomas Centre in Swansea.)

Since I have come as a guest of the ghost of Dylan Thomas, to talk about the living poet who borrowed his name, Bob Dylan, it seems right to begin on their common ground, which is to say their shared name. From that narrow meeting place I’d like to look a bit wider, at the relationship and the difference between them as artists, and hopefully cast some light wider still, on the relationship and the difference between songwriting and poetry. But to avoid confusion I think I’ll have to avoid the Dylan and refer to them, rather inconsistently, as Bob and Thomas.

In the book I wrote about Bob, The Nightingale’s Code, I dealt quite swiftly with this issue of the common name. In his early years, Bob was dismissive of the connection, as he had every right to be. Book poetry was not a major influence on what he was doing, at least at the beginning. He even went so far as to remark, somewhat petulantly, that he had done more for Dylan Thomas than Dylan Thomas had ever done for him – which I suppose was true, in that more people got to hear about Thomas through Bob than the other way round. Nevertheless there can be little doubt that Bob did know, when he chose his stage-name, that Dylan was the name of a poet – a wild-man poet with an amazing voice. It was also, of course, the name of a Western hero, Marshal Matt Dillon of the TV series Gunsmoke, and I think it was the combination of the two meanings – the cowboy-poet – within one sound that was decisive.

I also point out in the book that there was a third resonance, closer to home. Dillon Road, in Bob’s hometown of Hibbing, Minnesota, is a back lane on the outskirts that runs between disused mine-workings and spoil-tips. It was the road that one of his first girlfriends lived on, and it’s one of the roads leading to the town cemetery. Like the double echo of the name, that’s the kind of yoking together of opposites that’s characteristic of Bob. And this particular yoking, of the girl and the graveyard, is absolutely central to Thomas’s imagery. In that frame of reference it should be called bluntly the union of sex and death, which recurs in so much of his poetry, especially in the formative notebook poems of his late teens where he found his voice and his symbolism. In Bob’s world a better pair of terms would be love and loss – and again they’re fundamental themes of his work.

But I wouldn’t have presumed to make anything of the cemetery on Dillon Road if it hadn’t come up in some striking lines from a song Bob wrote in the early 1970s, called ‘Nobody ’Cept You’:

      Used to run in the cemetery,
      Dance and run and sing when I was a child,
      And it never seemed strange.
      Now I just pass mournfully
      By that place where the bones of life are piled.
      I know something has changed.
      I’m a stranger here
      And no-one sees me.

They’re striking because Bob, unlike Thomas, has not been much of a writer about his childhood (though there were other songs from this time which came out on the Planet Waves album that also harked back to memories of youth). There’s no mention of a girlfriend or of other playmates in those lines, but we can feel her or their presence. For one thing, a child who danced and sang in the graveyard on their own I think we would tend to regard as a bit strange. So there’s the implication that that freedom is a shared thing. And then when you hear the change that has come over him, that also has to do with fellowship: the thought that the bones provoke is less about the sadness of death than about loneliness and his lack of a companion: “I’m a stranger here and nobody sees me…”When he was joyful in the presence of the dead, he was not strange to himself; but now that he is mournful as we would expect, he finds himself a stranger.

So if we take those lines as retrospective evidence that he did connect the two ends of Dillon Road in his mind, and suppose that that echo too was part of his reason for taking the name, what does that tell us? Just that the desire to unite or synthesise disparate things was there at the very inception of his imaginative life, as it has proved an abiding feature ever since. Just to give one example, it was Bob, after all, who caused a new compound noun to enter the language – folk-rock – by melding what had been thought of as antagonistic styles.

For a while, Bob tried the ‘Dillon’ spelling of his new name, and the fact that he eventually opted for the Welsh spelling can only be due to Dylan Thomas. It’s fitting in two serendipitous ways. Firstly, because his greatest hero at the time also had a Welsh name.

Last time I was in Swansea, in November 2000, we went on from here to visit a friend in Pembrokeshire. On the way we made our pilgrimage to Laugharne, Dylan Thomas’s last home, and then, while I was reading the map, I found another place to which we’d have to make a pilgrimage. St Elvis Farm is on the south Pembrokeshire coast about a mile from a little port called Solva. The farm is on the site of a vanished church formerly dedicated, not to St Elvis, but to St Teilaw, who was a contemporary of St David. Nearby, on the lane to the clifftops, is a neolithic burial chamber called St Elvis Cromlech.

I’d always wondered where Elvis Presley got his name from, and nothing that I’ve read about him ever told me. I mean, the immediate source is obvious: it was the middle name of his father,Vernon Elvis Presley. But where did Vernon get it from? It’s known that Welsh emigrants left Solva for the New World as early as the 17th century, and were still doing so until at least the middle of the 19th century. It seems likely that one of them carried the name with him. Vernon, then, probably had Welsh ancestry. Elvis Presley’s mother had a Welsh name too, of course: Gladys.

Did Mr and Mrs Presley know the origin of the name, though? There’s a hint that they did. St Elvis was not actually a Welshman but an Irishman: he was the bishop of Munster who baptised St David. Now, Elvis Aron Presley was one of twins, and his stillborn brother, had he lived, would have been christened Jesse Garon Presley. Jesse in the Bible is the father of King David; so one of the brothers was named after the fleshly father of King David and the other after the spiritual father of St David. Coincidence, perhaps, but surprisingly neat.

Before we leave the subject, notice Jesse’s strange middle name, Garon, reminiscent of the Welsh name Geraint; and also that the Preseli Mountains are about 20 miles away from St Elvis Farm. With names like these – Elvis Presley, King Hiram ‘Hank’ Williams, Jimmie Rodgers, George Jones,Waylon Jennings – perhaps they should call it Country and Welsh music.

The second serendipity about Bob’s Welsh name is its meaning, which, as I understand it, is “the sea”. Now Dylan Thomas presumably knew the meaning of his name, but he would hardly need that symbolic connection to make the sea important in his poetry, since he spent the large part of his life in sight of it. On the other hand, I doubt very much if Bob knew the meaning of the name when he chose it, and I don’t know if he’d even seen the sea until he was nineteen and went to New York.Yet the sea has a particular and powerful place in his symbolism. I’ve devoted a section of The Nightingale’s Code to it, and I’d like to quote a passage now:

      Carl Jung, in his studies of what he termed the “collective
      unconscious”, saw in the sea the image of the collective
      unconscious itself. He pointed, for example, to the book of
      Revelation, where an angel elucidates the vision of the Great
      Whore of Babylon, saying to St John: “The waters that thou
      sawest, where the whore sitteth, are peoples, and multitudes,
      and nations, and tongues.”
            [So] it is peculiarly apt that Dylan should alight upon this
      symbol when he came to rename himself as an Everyman, a
      voice of the people, a dream figure for the masses who would
      be “bigger than Elvis” (as he vowed to be in his youth). Given
      that he’s unlikely to have known the name’s meaning when he
      chose it, or to have connected it with Jung’s or the New
      Testament’s symbolism, this significance could not have been a
      reason for his choice – unless it was a reason beyond reason.
      Unless, in other words, as he sought intuitively for a name that
      would speak to the collective unconscious, the collective
      unconscious proposed one of its own names.

The book goes on to look at some of the important appearances of the sea in Bob’s lyrics, and I’ll try to summarise that survey briefly here.

The single most prevalent symbol in Bob’s songs must surely be the road – which represents, at the simplest level, open-endedness, freedom, possibility, perhaps a quest. But for Bob it means something more. The road is not the same as the journey: it’s not just an individual matter. As he said in one of the first songs he recorded, he’s “walking a road other men have gone down”.The road, then, may represent restlessness and change for the wanderer who makes it his home, but it also paradoxically stands for continuity and tradition. On the road, we are always following in others’ footsteps.

Now to summarise the significance of Bob’s sea as succinctly as possible, I would say that the sea is where the road stops.That could mean death – as in the end of the ‘Ballad of Hollis Brown’, where “seven shots ring out like the ocean’s poundin’ roar”; or it could mean a more general catastrophe. Impending disaster often comes to Bob in the form of a flood, from ‘The Times They Are A-Changin’’ in 1963 – “Come gather round, people, wherever you roam / And admit that the waters around you have grown” – right through to ‘High Water’ in 2001: “High water risin’, six feet above my head, / Coffins dropping in the street like balloons made out of lead.” But the sea can also mean coming face to face with oneself, or with some other kind of inescapable and absolute reality.

It may be noted in passing that Bob’s latest biographer, Howard Sounes, emphasises what he sees as a formative incident in his subject’s early life, when one of his closest friends and musical compadres, Larry Keegan, was left paralysed after diving into shallow water on the coast of Florida. Bob was sixteen at the time and, as I said, he seems never to have been to the sea himself. This catastrophe may have stamped the ocean on his young imagination as both a mystery and a terrible menace. On the other hand, it should be remembered that from his very first years he had known something much like a sea. Lake Superior, which he lived beside till he was six or seven, is well over three hundred miles long and a hundred across at its broadest.To the eye it might as well be sea; and to the imagination it has some aspects of a sea, in that a different country, Canada, lies on the farther shore. Perhaps in contemplating it, though, you might also be aware that you could go around it; and that, not being briny, it is not a desert to human life, an alien and final limit.

The sea may not be a common symbol in Bob’s lyrics, but it appears at some crucial moments. It appears in the first lines of the song that first made him famous:

      How many roads must a man walk down
      Before you call him a man?
      Yes an’ how many seas must a white dove sail
      Before she sleeps in the sand?

It appears in the last lines of the song that first opened the floodgates of his poetic imagery:

      And I’ll stand on the ocean until I start sinkin’
      But I’ll know my song well before I start singin’,
      And it’s a hard, it’s a hard, it’s a hard, an’ it’s a hard,
      It’s a hard rain’s a-gonna fall.

It appears in the last lines of a song that seems to celebrate some vital moment of enlightenment:

      Yes, to dance beneath the diamond sky with one hand waving free,
      Silhouetted by the sea,
      Circled by the circus sands,
      With all memory and fate
      Driven deep beneath the waves.
      Let me forget about today until tomorrow.

It appears in the song that commemorated and also marked the end of his marriage:

      I laid on the dune, I looked at the sky,
      When the children were babies and played on the beach.
      You came up behind me, I saw you go by.
      You were always so close, an’ still within reach.
      Sara, O Sara…

(Notice that the chorus spells out the signal for those in peril on the sea, S-OS.) It appears in the last lines of the beautiful song that summed up his period as a religious devotee:

      I hear the ancient footsteps
      Like the motion of the sea.
      Sometimes I turn, there’s someone there,
      Other times it’s only me.
      I am hanging in the balance
      Of the reality of man
      Like every sparrow falling,
      Like every grain of sand.

It appears at the beginning of the song in which he returned to and took the measure of the mythic dimensions of being Bob Dylan:

      Standing on the water, casting your bread,
      While the eyes of the idol with the iron head are glowing.
      Distant ships sailin’ in through the mist.
      You were born with a snake in both your fists
      While a hurricane was blowing.
      Freedom, just around the corner for you.
      But with truth so far off, what good would it do?
      Jokerman, dance to the nightingale tune…

And what of the sea in Dylan Thomas? Let me quote the scholar Gwyn Williams: introducing his English versions of poetry from the 6th century to 1600 (Welsh Poems, Faber, 1973), he identifies a distinctive aesthetic of these poets, who “were not trying to write poems that would read like Greek temples or even Gothic cathedrals but, rather, like stone circles or the contourfollowing rings of the forts from which they fought, with hidden ways slipping from one to another. More obviously, their writing was like the inter-woven inventions preserved in early Celtic manuscripts and on stone crosses, where what happens in a corner is as important as what happens at the centre, because there often is no centre.” He goes on to cite Dylan Thomas and David Jones as 20th-century exemplars of this same tradition.

Now it seems to me that this interweaving design is itself the central theme of Thomas’s poetry: that it is a repeated attempt to articulate, in as close as possible to an unbroken moment, the simultaneity and transubstantiality of the weather and the heart, the blood and the river, the dunghill and the stars, the bones and the rocks, the copulating prick and the corrupting maggot, the grave and the womb. His theme, in a word, is that everything is everything. And if one symbol could be said to stand for this everything, rolling it all along together, swallowing it and pouring it forth, then it is the sea.

In a moment, I’d like to look at how Thomas arrived at this theme, and from there perhaps we’ll see what the two Dylans share in a broader cultural perspective, apart from – or perhaps I should say, underneath – the more or less coincidental connections I’ve pointed out. But first let me mention a couple of possible direct links from Thomas to Bob.

The first lies in the period in 1964 and ’65 when Bob was gestating what came to be called folk-rock – a term he hated. Before the revolutionary move of adding bass and drums and electric guitars to his backing, he had already, though more quietly, revolutionised folksong itself; so this folk to which he supposedly added rock was already well beyond the existing categories.

What he did in the simplest terms was to bring in far more words – more both in the sheer number per song and in their diversity. He had a starting point near to hand in the late, wordy songs of Woody Guthrie and in the performed outpourings of the Beat poets, but there’s no doubt that in this period Bob was also absorbing and emulating book-poetry. And one of the most likely sources for the dense, declamatory surrealism of songs like ‘Gates of Eden’ and ‘It’s Alright, Ma (I’m Only Bleeding)’, or the rolling visionary phrases of ‘Chimes of Freedom’, is surely Dylan Thomas.

A possible second instance of direct influence is in the structure of Bob’s albums. This is something I explain fully in the book, but in simple terms: on his first few records, and particularly his second, third and fourth, Bob developed a mirror-image structure for his LPs, so that the last song responds to or reflects the first, the second-to-last reflects the second, and so on, with the dividing line being the break between the two sides of the LP. It didn’t occur to me when I was writing the book, though, that Bob wouldn’t have had to look too far into his namesake’s work to find a very striking precedent for this. It is exactly the form of rhyme scheme that Thomas used, on a huge scale, for the Prologue to his Collected Poems, where he has two stanzas of 51 lines each, the second rhyming with all the line-endings of the first, but in reverse order.

This Prologue, of course, like most Prologues and Prefaces, is actually an Epilogue – an author’s look back over what has been written and not a preparation for it. Now I’d like to look at the real beginning of Thomas’s poetry.

If the time when young Bobby Zimmerman decided he was going to be Bob Dylan marked the end of his obscure gestation and the moment of his imagination’s birth, then the equivalent moment for young Dylan Thomas can be dated quite precisely. It was 27th April 1930, the date on the first poem in the first of the four surviving notebooks in which he developed his poetic voice. These notebooks, edited by Professor Ralph Maud, were published as Poet in the Making in 1968, and were republished in 1989 as The Notebook Poems 1930–34. It’s not a great book of poems by any means, but the story it tells, as you piece it together, is a fascinating one.

When I first started reading poetry and about poetry, in the mid-Seventies, the idea was floating about that Thomas was a teenage prodigy who’d had all his inspiration before he was twenty and had spent the rest of his life living off the scraps of it and drinking himself to death to make up for his poetic impotence. That was the story these notebooks were supposed to tell, and that, I have to tell you, is a goddam lie. He did write the poems in his first published book in an incredible surge of discovery, and he did come back and mine the same seam for the material of his second, but if he wrote more slowly later, and if he turned back to firm up early hints that he hadn’t been able to follow through, he also wrote steadily better as time went on. And far from being worked out, it seems to me that the long poem he’d started on, ‘In Country Heaven’, promised to be magnificent, and that the had both the plod and the brilliance to see it through. But I digress.

The first poem in the first surviving notebook marks a moment of imaginative birth because at this point Thomas deliberately put behind him his early virtuosity in verse-making and set out to find his own voice. In an essay on ‘Modern Poetry’ that he wrote in 1929 for his grammar school magazine, the poets he mentioned as models of free verse were Sacheverell Sitwell and Richard Aldington, though a stronger and more lasting influence seems to have been D.H. Lawrence. The first notebook poem, entitled ‘Osiris. Come to Isis’, is a typically Imagist mix of visual luxuriance, replete with flowers and ornaments from antiquity, with a limpid, but too often just limp, simplicity of diction. You can feel though, just troubling the surface, the more vibrant and mystical sensuality that Lawrence had set off.

As a piece of storytelling, this Osiris poem is a right old jumble – a kind of drowned mythology. Instead of that clear though winding track that a genuine myth leads us down, this just drifts backwards and forwards among its images. But the images themselves are telling. I’m not going to try and unravel the Osiris myth here, and I haven’t the expertise to anyway, but suffice it to say that Osiris was, or became, the god of just about everything. He was one of those giant forms to whom more and more meanings are drawn until there doesn’t seem to be anything that they don’t represent. He was the fruit of the union of the sky-god and the earth-goddess. His wife was Isis, the supreme goddess, who was also his sister, and in his union with her he is a god of fertility. He was murdered by a jealous brother but brought back to life by his wife and son, so he was the god both of death and resurrection, both a victim and a king. His son was Horus, represented as a falcon, who was himself a sun-god. So Osiris, as the father of the sun, is ultimately a god of the cosmos.

Part of his myth is that his body was dismembered and the parts scattered up and down the Nile, and that Isis and Horus collected and reassembled him before he was brought back to life. So he also symbolised the cycle of the Nile – the annual advance and retreat of whose waters was the Egyptians’ most powerful natural symbol. The voyage beyond this life was always represented> as a journey by water.

Now in Thomas’s poem the elements of this mythology that come uppermost are, of course, the sex – the longed-for union of Isis and Osiris; and death, of course; and a lot of water. Osiris at the beginning of the poem immerses himself in the river and seems to become one with it; and he seeks his completion, his union with Isis, within or through the waters. In a tentative, fragmented way,Thomas at the very beginning has formulated his own myth – he lays out the story that unfolds in these notebooks. It’s the story of someone gradually lowering himself into a watery abyss. He casts off regular verse, though for this first poem he still clings on to rhyme. He sheds that, and as the first notebook goes on, he gradually sheds all outward subject matter, narrative incident or mundane description.

The last poem of the first notebook is also, interestingly, the very earliest of the notebook poems that he reworked to become part of his adult work. In the original version it begins like this:

      How shall the animal
      Whose way I trace
      Into the dark recesses
      Be durable
      Under such weight as bows me down,
      The bitter certainty of waste,
      The knowing that I hatch a thought
      To see it crushed
      Beneath your foot, my bantering Philistine!

In a crude and partial paraphrase: how can I express myself, my energetic self, in a restrictive, petty-minded society? This is, in other words, the fundamental question, the quest we saw him set out on: the search for a completeness of being. Here is the beginning of the poem as it appears in the Collected Poems:

      How shall my animal
      Whose wizard shape I trace in the cavernous skull,
      Vessel of abscesses and exultation’s shell,
      Endure burial under the spelling wall,
      The invoked shrouding veil at the cap of the face,
      Who should be furious,
      Drunk as a vineyard snail, flailed like an octopus,
      Roaring, crawling, quarrel
      With the outside weathers,
      The natural circle of the discovered skies
      Draw down to its weird eyes?

The basic question is there still, but obviously this is only a version of the same poem in the sense that an oak is a version of an acorn. It’s interesting to see, though, how tiny shards of the sound of the original have survived while nearly all the words and images have disappeared. So “dark recesses” becomes “vessel of abscesses”; and “whose way I trace” becomes “whose wizard shape I trace”; and “be durable” becomes “endure burial”.The original question has been recast, however. It’s no longer the one that he picked up from D.H. Lawrence, of how the fuller self can survive amid social convention. It’s become the bigger question of whether “my animal” can coexist with speech at all – at least I think that’s what Thomas means by “the spelling wall, / The invoked shrouding veil at the cap of the face”.

The answer to that question, of course, is under our very noses: for how the energetic self endures burial is, by being written like this. Or as Thomas said of this piece in one of his letters: “The poem is, as all poems are, its own question and answer, its own contradiction, its own agreement.

But we’re getting ahead of ourselves. Here at the end of the first notebook, Thomas has arrived only at the right question. In the second notebook he sheds even more of the forms of language – he sheds sense and then he sheds syntax, and eventually he comes to the bottom of his abyss, and sounds a fundamental note of disgust. He has sunk down below the level of the mental to the purely physical, and found there is nothing pure about it. The animal is only flesh, and the flesh is only corruption; life is death.

      No use to run run your head against the wall
      To find a sweet blankness in the blood and shell.
      This pus runs deep.

Which brings us nearly to the end of the second notebook, the winter of 1931 and the beginning of Thomas’s seventeenth year. On 20th January 1932 he writes an obscure but craftily made sonnet addressed to a skeleton. Then there’s silence for a while, and then there are a few spring notes like this, in April 1932:

      No man knows loveliness at all,
      Though he be beauty blessed,
      Who has not known the loveliness of May,
      The blossoms and the throated trees
      Lifting their branches lit with singing birds
      Into the laden air…

Now there’s a touch of reversion to his old pastiching self here – I think he might be doing a bit of a late Yeats – but it’s carried on a piece of real blackbird melody.Then suddenly, on 9th May 1932, comes this:

      The hunchback in the park,
      A solitary mister
      Propped between trees and water,
      Going daft for fifty seven years,
      Is going dafter,
      A cripple children call at,
      Half-laughing, by no other name than mister,
      They shout hey mister
      Running when he has heard them clearly
      Past lake and rookery
      On out of sight.

      There is a thing he makes when quiet comes
      To the young nurses with the children
      And the three veteran swans,
      Makes a thing inside the hanging head,
      Creates a figure without fault
      And sees it on the gravel paths
      Or walking on the water.

      The figure’s frozen all the winter
      Until the summer melts it down
      To make a figure without fault.
      It is a poem and it is a woman figure.

      Mister, the children call, hey mister,
      And the hunchback in the park
      Sees the molten figure on the water,
      Misty, now mistier,
      And hears its woman’s voice;
      Mister, it calls, hey mister,
      And the hunchback smiles.

Professor Maud calls this “essentially the same poem” as the one we know from the Collected Poems, but I think there is an essential difference. Apart from all the vivid childhood detail that Thomas added into his final version, there is a major change in the resolution:

      And the old dog sleeper
      Alone between nurses and swans
      While the boys among willows
      Made the tigers jump out of their eyes
      To roar on the rockery stones
      And the groves were blue with sailors

      Made all day until bell time
      A woman figure without fault
      Straight as a young elm
      Straight and tall from his crooked bones
      That she might stand in the night
      After the locks and chains

      All night in the unmade park
      After the railings and shrubberies
      The birds the grass the trees the lake
      And the wild boys innocent as strawberries
      Had followed the hunchback
      To his kennel in the dark.

What Thomas lost was the image of the woman being made of water, and of her being the hunchback’s wife, which is the implication when she too calls him “Mister”. (And while I’m carping, the later, louder Thomas doesn’t make any sound quite as pleasing as that sequence: mister, water, dafter, fifty, mister, mister – water, winter, figure – mister, water, mistier, mister.) What the later version importantly adds – as well as taking the sugariness off the very end – is the idea that the woman becomes the park; that the daylight reality – “The birds the grass the trees the lake” – goes away in the hunchback’s head and his personification of beauty is left in their place. She is, in other words, the goddess of the park, which is to say of nature.

From both of the versions put together, though not quite in either of them alone, we learn that she is Isis, the white goddess, bringing life to her maimed Osiris, who finds her in the water. Or to put it another way, at this point in May 1932, a seventeen-year-old cub reporter in Swansea gained his first clear view of what he had set out to find.

The next breakthrough in the notebooks comes a year later, in April 1933. Watching the growth of this poet’s mind, I’m inclined to accept the theory of evolution that says that living things evolve gradually, accumulating small changes, but that this slow transformation can be punctuated by sudden leaps. “The hunchback in the park” and the little April poems that come before it seem too gentle and peaceful to mark a revolutionary change, but they are a turning point. In mythic terms, it could be compared to the moment when Dante and Virgil, clambering down the shaggy side of Satan, pass the centre of the earth and find that the way down has become the way up. (In fact, the hunchback’s vision is like a foretaste of a later moment in that same myth, when Dante on the top of Mount Purgatory sees the woman he longs for, Beatrice, on the far side of a water, in the middle of a garden of trees, which is Eden.)

It’s not that Thomas’s poetry after April 1932 was all jolly odes to the joys of spring. On the contrary, the imagery of darkness, poison, contagion, death and futility become steadily more prevalent. But it is as though, moving in the same direction, he is no longer going down into his abyss but coming up from it, as though at this point the horror flipped over and the realisation that Life equals Death has started to unfold its opposite, that Death equals Life. Through the nightmare Thomas begins to burn with what W. H.Auden called “an affirming flame”.

This isn’t felt at first in the form of assertions, but in the pulse of the verse itself. Having stripped his easy music down to a grating fractured sound, through the first couple of notebooks, now Thomas accumulates a music of his own. The rhythms start to spring; he begins to build up those coiling lines with one image turning into another and another, or turning back on itself. But all these changes are slight and gradual, as he keeps playing and playing his instrument of words, finding phrases and riffs but not quite a whole tune. Then, as I said, suddenly, in April 1933, just before halfway through the third of the notebooks, there comes something thrilling like a trumpet blast. In its original notebook form, the poem was published in the New English Weekly in May 1933 and marked Thomas’s debut on the London literary stage. Surprisingly, given its power, Thomas was in two minds about including it in his second book, 25 Poems, in 1936, but Vernon Watkins persuaded him that he should and so he produced the revised
version that entered the canon:

      And death shall have no dominion.
      Dead men naked they shall be one
      With the man in the wind and the west moon;
      When their bones are picked clean and the clean bones gone,
      They shall have stars at elbow and foot;
      Though they go mad they shall be sane,
      Though they sink through the sea they shall rise again;
      Though lovers be lost love shall not;
      And death shall have no dominion.

      And death shall have no dominion.
      Under the windings of the sea
      They lying long shall not die windily;
      Twisting on racks when sinews give way,
      Strapped to a wheel, yet they shall not break;
      Faith in their hands shall snap in two,
      And the unicorn evils run them through;
      Split all ends up they shan’t crack;
      And death shall have no dominion.

      And death shall have no dominion.
      No more may gulls cry at their ears
      Or waves break loud on the seashores;
      Where blew a flower may a flower no more
      Lift its head to the blows of the rain;
      Though they be mad and dead as nails,
      Heads of the characters hammer through daisies;
      Break in the sun till the sun breaks down,
      And death shall have no dominion.

There’s an interesting biographical background to this poem and through it I can bring my essay back round to the Dylan it’s supposed to be about. ‘And death shall have no dominion’ was written in response to a challenge issued by Thomas’s friend Bert Trick, to see who could write the best poem on the subject of immortality. If Mr Trick had any sense, and he seems to have had, I suspect he knew what the result would be. His effort is worthy, if not terribly distinguished. It begins:

      For death is not the end!
      Though soul turns sour
      And faith dry-rots,
      Let maggots feed on flesh
      That once was blossom pink
      And memory sink
      Beneath the dust of falling years,
      Yet death is not the end!
      For death is not the end!

By a peculiar coincidence, the text of this poem, which first appeared in the Swansea and West Wales Guardian in 1934, was republished in 1988 in the notes to a new edition of Dylan Thomas’s Collected Poems, and in the same year Bob Dylan put out a sad little song, one which he’d written and recorded five years earlier which goes like this:

      When you’re sad and when you’re lonely
      And you haven’t got a friend,
      Just remember
      That death is not the end.
      When all that you hold sacred
      Falls down and does not mend,
      Just remember
      That death is not the end.
      Not the end – no, no,
      Not the end – no, no,
      Just remember
      That death is not the end.

I should point out that one of Bob’s critics refers to this song as “irredeemable” and a “death-knell to inspiration”. Now, it may not show him at his peak, but I don’t think it’s as bad as that.

One aspect of ‘Death Is Not the End’ that is very characteristic of Bob is its underlying ambivalence. The implication of the refrain is that a reward awaits us in the afterlife – but none of the verses actually says that.What they actually say is: when your life is really miserable, just remember – it’s not going to stop.Thanks, Bob.

The counterbalance to all the verses is the middle eight, which does finally spell out why ‘death is not the end’ is supposed to be some consolation:

      For the tree of life is growing where the spirit never dies
      And the bright light of salvation shines in dark and empty skies.

The middle eight weighs against the rest of the song in another way as well – by having a different rhyme. All the other lines in the song have one rhyme only, which is ‘end’: friend, mend, comprehend, bend, descend, lend; and then in the last verse, having broken up the rhyme in the middle eight, “burning flesh of men” and “law-abiding citizen”. For a song about not ending, it certainly hammers home its ends heavily enough.

But the meaning of a song is something different from the meaning of its words.Though the verses don’t give us any reason to be glad that death is not the end, we still feel a consolation in that phrase because of the way that Bob’s small, weary voice is embraced by the strong and tender singing of Clydie King in the refrain. It’s as though he’s singing half of a harmony on the verses which only makes sense when she joins him. And the first time this happens is after the line “you haven’t got a friend” – then there she is, as good and true a friend to Bob’s voice as could be. There’s a similar effect in the use of the little choir in the chorus. All the sense of comfort, faith and affirmation in the song are concentrated in the words they sing, which are:
“No, no. No, no.No, no.”

Now I may seem to have got by a trick from Dylan Thomas, via Bert Trick, to Bob Dylan. But there is a good reason for introducing the subject of songs with ‘And death shall have no dominion’. The writing process that we were following in Thomas’s notebooks was private, inward-seeking and obscure.When Bert Trick issued that challenge to him, he was challenging him to write for an audience, even if it was only an audience of one, and Thomas rose to it – as I think Trick thought he might – by finding almost at a stroke what came to be recognised as his public voice.

The sources of this rhetoric must surely include the tradition of firebrand Welsh preachers. It can be no coincidence that Thomas takes off from a biblical quotation just like a preacher with his text, and he keeps reiterating it in that incantatory way that we associate with the preaching of the black churches, which share a common ancestry with the Welsh chapel tradition. Thomas, however, brought this rhythmical speech a little higher, towards song. What he discovers in ‘And death shall have no dominion’ is not so much a speaking as a singing voice. He discovered the power of the refrain, and unlike the moment of spiritual discovery in ‘The hunchback in the park’, when he made this technical discovery he knew what he had found. He quickly tried the same thing again, experimenting with repeated lines and phrases, with repetitions with variation, and with regular stanzas, loosely tied with half rhyme but strongly marked by recurring cadences. He soon learned how to keep his tunes going while changing the words completely.

For example, here are the last two syllables of the first line, and the seven syllables of the second line from each of the stanzas of ‘I dreamed my genesis’, one of the poems in Thomas’s first book:

      breaking / Through the rotating shell, strong
      shuffled / Off from the creasing flesh, filed
      costly / A creature in my bones I
      shrapnel / Rammed in the marching heart, hole
      harvest / Of hemlock and the blades, rust
      second / Rise of the skeleton and
      fallen / Twice in the feeding sea, grown

The last breakthrough recorded in the notebooks comes on 12th October 1933 with the writing of ‘The force that through the green fuse drives the flower’. From there – about halfway through – the fourth notebook is effectively a working draft of 18 Poems,Thomas’s first collection. So that great lyric is what it says, a “green fuse”, which sets off the flowering or explosion of his poetry, and which finally fuses its themes and elements in one piece.

The concluding part of this article can be found in Judas! issue 6