A week ago was my Birthday and I spent it travelling to Elba, an island of the coast of Italy, to attend a wedding. The day was a transition not only from one country to another but also from a head full of tiredness and turmoil to another, calmer and more reflective frame of mind. Were I a poet, I might have tried to capture how I felt in verse. I remembered a sensational ‘birthday’ poem by Dylan Thomas : ‘Poem in October’, which he started in 1941 but finally finished in the autumn of 1944 to celebrate his thirtieth birthday. He was born on 27th October 1914.
I looked it up online and came across a YouTube clip of the poet reading his own poem – I am always surprised that there is no hint of a Welsh accent in his mellifluous voice. I listened all though and then read the poem. It’s so beautiful!
The first stanza begins:
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 webbed wall
Myself to set foot
That second
In the still sleeping town and set forth.
On his birthday early in the morning, the poet walked from the fishing village of Laugharne along the silent sea shore. As he thinks of his birthday he recalls his childhood days and looks at the beauty around him. October stands between summer and winter; thirty is poised between childhood and maturity, past and future. Dylan Thomas may have thought that the age of thirty was the high noon or high tide of his life, and may have had a reasonable expectation of reaching sixty. He was not to know that he would live only for another 9 years. He died of pneumonia on 9th November 1953, aged 39.
As he recalls walking through the woods and up on Fern hill as a child, the past and present merge as he celebrates the glory of nature, a truth he learned first in his childhood days and now in his adult life. Here are the final six line of this marvellous poem:
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.
His heart’s truth and his wonderful poems are still read and celebrated seventy-four years after he wrote this and, as one of the most important Welsh poets of the 20th century, Dylan Thomas will continue to inspire and delight us for years to come.