“Thomas’s methods as a teenager, bogged in masturbatory claustrophobia, desperately seeking in language the fulfilment of clandestine sexual needs …. those methods were suited to the phallocentric, percussive, short-circuited poetry proper to his situation then, but they were not what he needed later as a sexually mature, world-scarred and world-skilled outsider at the literary centre. Thomas’s anti-intellectualism, for example, is a bad boy’s habit wastefully prolonged and his doctrinaire immaturity, which was at once tedious and entertaining in life, was finally retrograde for his art.”

Seamus Heaney: “Dylan the Durable? On Dylan Thomas.” in The Redress of Poetry (1995) pages 140-141.

This quote from The Oxford Lecture given in November 1991 by the then Oxford University Professor of Poetry, who later became the Nobel Laureate in Literature in 1995, is one of the crudest most shameful pieces of literary criticism I have ever read. Its self-indulgent tone is disturbing and as a psychologist I have to suspect some nasty unconscious eruption from Heaney’s Catholic masturbatory guilt.  Apart from my objection to the content and style of this crude utterance I also think he is just plain wrong. It is interesting to note that in Finders Keepers: Selected Prose 1971- 2001 (2002) in the much-edited version of this piece the above quote is cut entirely and what remains of the lecture is confined to Heaney’s praise of Thomas’s “Do Not Go Gentle Into That Goodnight”. Somewhere Heaney once complained about Ciaran Carson’s harsh criticism of him, particularly of his collection North (1975), but I am not aware Carson ever called Heaney a “tosser” as Heaney did here in his criticism of Thomas, albeit covertly in academic, euphemistic language.

Most of Heaney’s abuse is triggered by Thomas’s “Fern Hill”, I think unfairly. I want therefore to say a little about this poem; an appreciation of it if you will. Why does Heaney find this poem makes him so uncomfortable with its emotional tone? And it is I think an emotional discomfort that prompts his sexual outburst. It is rather like the embarrassment one might feel being in church next to a clearly extravert person who is singing out the alleluia responses and your conservative nature inhibits you from joining in. This example touches on the cultural divide between the two poets and I want to look at that.

I visited my grandfather’s house in Desertmartin, County Derry when I was a teenager; it is a ten-minute drive from Bellaghy, Heaney’s home town. At Sunday Mass with my family nobody sang, it wasn’t in Irish it was in Latin; old people tolled their beads. In the environment of the Catholic-Protestant sectarian divide Catholics kept their heads down. Even in the house, an atmosphere of patriarchal oppression created a gulf between the younger inhabitants and the “old man” sitting and spitting into the fire. Even In 1994 when I came to live in Ireland (a few years after Heaney’s lecture in Oxford) there was no tradition of singing in Irish Catholic churches and the two American nuns I sat next to at Christmas Midnight Mass in Galway Cathedral were puzzled by the lack of joyousness. 

You have to contrast this cultural atmosphere with a Welsh Chapel where the singing and joyous praise is the essence of the experience. You have to think of the brotherhood of the miners; the solidarity of the trade union, their choirs and accomplished brass bands. All of this in contrast with the harsh drumming of the Apprentice Boys on the Derry walls. In 1985 Welsh Miners led the Gay Pride march in London to show their appreciation for the support Gays had shown them during their national strike. Can you imagine a chapter of the Orange Order in Derry doing this and certainly not a Catholic group either. Wales is known as the Land of Song; it is built in to its cultural tradition and part of this is religious, evangelical Christian but also and not least the older Druidical tradition which had a great harmony with and respect for the natural world and the Welsh pastoral and mountainous landscapes. The atmosphere of “Fern Hill” is rooted in all this. And this is antipathetic to Heaney’s world. He sits next to his brother writer in the “Literary Centre” and feels uncomfortable and embarrassed.

Fern Hill is a poem of praise in the religious sense, it recalls creation itself and the first great words of Genesis: let there be light:

“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.”

The effect of phrases like, “simple light” (why “simple” because it is not the electro-magnetic radiation, the photons, we know about from a scientific materialism it is simply the birth of sight as we know it …the opening of a child’s eye) then “spinning” and “spellbound” are so magical, we are being taken into a world of non-ordinary perception and into the opening of the fields of sacred praise. And I am reminded of the American poet Robert Duncan’s “Often I Am Permitted To Return To A Meadow” from The Opening of the Field (1960), Duncan has:

“Often I am permitted to return to a meadow

as if it were a scene made-up by the mind,

That is not mine, but is a made place,

That is mine, it is so near to the heart,

An eternal pasture folded in all thought

So that there is a hall therein

That is a made place, created by light

Wherefrom the shadows that are forms fall. “

Is this also “the spinning place” a sacred “meadow”, created by “the simple light” that is the “fields of praise”?  I spent some time searching for Thomas’s phrase “the fields of praise” in a Welsh hymn, I was so convinced he was quoting one; but I found none. I like to think that the above quote is crucial to an interpretation of the whole poem. Not only does it give it its religious grounding but it expresses a freeing of the spirit: The confined horses, the archetypal symbol of the human soul in Plato’s Phaedrus, are released “On to the fields of praise.” So, “the whinnying green stable” is a pent-up enclosure but also an actual ontological thing in the poet’s experience of his environment. This linkage with the thing described be it the farm, the swallows, the foxes and its more spiritual and transcendental significance forms a framework in the poem; there is a blending in, a merging, where reality dissolves into a metaphysical description almost. This is a common quality in mystical experience. The poet is describing a time of freedom, as a religious experience. Like the stable is to the horses of the chariot of the soul, so the farm house is an enclosure of the ego and the self from which he finds freedom:

“As I rode to sleep the owls were bearing the farm away”

There is a release here too into the world of the unconscious. The image seems at first too romantic but sounds do serve and facilitate transcendental experience. I imagine it is a Long-Eared Owl not a Barn Owl, a soft ghostly hooting sound. I think of the use of sound in meditation; the gong in Tibet and I remember walking high up in the Cumbrian mountains in the English Lake District and sitting on a smooth rock to meditate, listening to the sound of the nearby mountain stream; and indeed, as I listened with my eyes closed, the mountain, like the farm, went away! This use of sound as an image is a recurrent theme in the poem. My reference to my meditation in Cumbria makes me wonder at his lines:

“And the sabbath rang slowly / In the pebbles of the holy streams.”

The religious context is clear, with reference to the Welsh sabbath chapel bells and the streams are “holy”, as of course to the religious /mystic all streams are! And I can’t help thinking of Hopkins’s, “As tumbled over rim in roundy wells/Stones ring…” from “As Kingfishers Catch Fire”; Stones and bells, the mystical blending, like a kind of synaesthesia, where one sound blends with a different sound yet the mind relates it, fuses it to find a relationship or even a polarity. The natural world in the poem becomes a sanctuary, a cosmic chapel and place of spiritual ecstasy. 

Rather than seeing this “hymn to nature” aspect of the poem Heaney sees only the theme of time and loss And so he compares it to Wordsworth’s “Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood”:

“Yet its dimensions as a poem of loss become plainer if we set it beside Wordsworth’s “Immortality Ode”. The comparison is unfair, of course, but it makes clear that what ¨Fern Hill¨ lacks is precisely an intonation arising from the “years that bring the philosophic mind”, being more concerned to overwhelm its sorrows in a tidal wave of recollection than to face what Rilke calls “a side of life that is turned away from us.” (Heaney, Ibid pages 142-143)

Sadly,  Heaney goes on to imply that the poem may be “otiose” or merely “ornamental” and his phrase ¨tidal wave¨ suggests it is self-indulgent or over the top in some way. His complaint about Thomas’s “anti-intellectualism” which is “the bad boy’s habit” begs the question here: what is wrong with “anti-intellectualism”? Though personally I don’t believe mystical creativity can be described under that heading. (Many of the English Romantic poets by this measure must have been “bad boys”.) 

However, there is no doubt that Thomas is concerned with the passing of time and loss; one can hear the “minister” in chapel commenting on the shortness of life and the corruptibility of the world but as in “Do Not Go Gentle” he rages  against it in an emotional hymn to his lost freedom. He does “recollect” but almost in an ecstasy of religious fervour, an emotional out pouring that makes the comparison with the Wordsworth, not just unfair, but totally inappropriate. Wordsworth rarely describes the nature of the emotional loss of “Grandeur” that the child experiences but is later lost to the adult; his method is more a descriptive nature poetry not a  form of poetic psychological mysticism. Here I think Heaney would be better served by looking at the beginning section of Wordsworth’s “The Prelude” (1799):

“Beloved Derwent, fairest of all streams,”

(Thomas has “holy streams”)

“Was it for this that I, a four years child,

A naked boy, among thy silent pools”

(Thomas’s streams have pebbles that ring like sabbath bells.)

“Made one long bathing of a summer’s day,

…. or coursed 

Over the sandy fields, and dashed the flowers 

Of yellow groundsel or, when crag and hill,

The woods, and distant Skiddaw’s lofty height,

Were bronzed with a deep radiance, stood alone

A naked savage in the thunder-shower?”

Compare this description with:

“in the sun that is young once only,

Time let me play  and be

Golden in the mercy of his means” 

Wordsworth’s method here is to describe the abandon of the 4 year old child without any attempt at the metaphysical creative  imagery employed by Thomas and to ask in a matter of fact, even prosaic way, if the river:

“composed my thoughts

To more than infant softness, giving me 

….

A knowledge, a dim earnest of the calm

Which nature breathes among the fields and groves?”

The difference here with Thomas’s method is striking and we must ask: does it show, as Heaney suggests, what “Fern Hill” lacks? (It does show why Wordsworth disliked some of Coleridge’s poems like Kubla Khan which Coleridge claimed was conceived of in a state of altered consciousness.) It does show the lack of intellectual questioning which Heaney refers to in his Wordsworth quote as “the philosophic mind.” Unlike the above Wordsworth there are no question marks in the text of Fern Hill, “mind” is not the ruler here. Wordsworth’s form of recollection is controlled by the added quality of “tranquillity” in which emotion is tempered by thought and intellect and so is Heaney’s. This, dare I say, rather English form of emotional control is part of what Thomas rebels against, even one suspects, his alcohol abuse is, as Christina Grof puts it, “the thirst for wholeness”; a kind of healing of the mind-body split which sees emotional creativity as a valid form of knowing. 

The final stanza in the poem is a little  problematic in its interpretation. The wonderful imagery, which I described above as metaphysical, or at least mystical, is slightly in contradiction to the underlying feeling of  time as a destroyer and this is true in other places in the poem but especially as we reach the point of the ultimate loss of the farm in this last stanza; for it is this concept of the actual place,  that is the farm, that contains and holds the poet’s imaginative power:

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

But in a way, what Wordsworth and maybe Heaney too could not do, Thomas has recreated the lost experience so magically in the poem; the farm still lives and exists in his poetic imagination and importantly, this living farm that is also an image of his being, his Self as Jung would say, is almost reborn to a heightened level that perhaps even exceeds his childhood experience.

Time the ultimate destroyer, in the poem is liberal and like a good parent indulges him, allows him to be free:

“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…”

There is a polarity between time, the great giver of life and time, seen as its taker away; I hear Hopkins again:

…we, though our flower the same,

Wave with the meadow, forget that there must

The sour scythe cringe, and the blear share come.”

                                                          (Hopkins, The Wreck of the Deutschland, Verse 11.)

This in the poem’s imagery presents a contradiction which is dramatic and mythical in its human tragedy on the one hand yet sublime in its joy on the other. A joy the poem never hides from because of its end point. 

The final stanza, which I think centres on the “farm forever fled” is introduced with the following striking image:

“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…”

Is there something in this journey “Up to the swallow thronged loft” that presages the ultimate loss? It certainly feels that way from the context of the line. And “by the shadow of my hand” has the same dark feeling to it. Nowhere else do we get this sense of the body’s shadow and being led by the hand. This experience didn’t worry him in the “lamb white days” but it is presented now as something to do with the advent and conclusion of loss. I feel that contained in these lines is the idea of the swallow as a summer visitor to the loft, one that will leave in the autumn, the loft will be bereft, full only of deserted nests, I think this is the source of the emotional feeling here. It is used in this way by Keats in his final line of “To Autumn”, a poem full of images of time and death, as he sees the swallows “gathering “ to depart , marking  the passage of time:

“And gathering swallows twitter in the skies.”

The final line of the stanza seems like it is full of rage as in “Do Not Go Gentle”:

“Though I sang in my chains like the sea.”

The sea bounded in its tides by time and the ever rising moon, the moon a strong symbol of time’s presence in the poem, yet it sings out within time’s confines with beauty and power. It seems it should refer back to the child who finds this joy in spite of time’s unperceived threat but it also feels, as one reaches the end of the poem, that the poet in his unspoken present still sings like the sea in spite of time’s chains.

“Rage, rage against the dying of the light.”

Bibliography

Duncan, Robert: “The Opening of the Field”, Grove Press, New York City, 1960.

Heaney, Seamus: “The Redress of Poetry, Oxford Lectures”, Faber and Faber, London, 1995

Heaney, Seamus: “Finders  Keepers, Selected Prose 1971-2001”, Faber & Faber, London, 2002.

Keats, John: “Selections From Keats”, Macmillan, London,1933

Hopkins, Gerard Manley: “The Poems of Gerard  Manley Hopkins”, Oxford U.P. London, 1967

Plato, “Plato, The Collected Dialogues”, Princeton University Press, Princeton, 1961.

Thomas, Dylan, “Selected Poems”, Weidenfeld and Nicolson, London, 2014

Wordsworth, William: “The Prelude”,  Penguin Books, London, 1995.