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.

October finally rolls around…

One of those wonderful poems which make you feel glad just to be alive.

I’ve mentioned Thomas’ skill in using the compressed metaphor before¹. Poem In October has many beautiful examples of his art: phrases like ‘the heron-priested shore’, ‘a springful of larks’, ‘the parables of sun light’ and ‘the legends of the green chapels’ fairly shimmer with joy and wonder and mystical beauty.

Simply glorious.

— Thomas

As a matter of fact, Fern Hill is very similar to today’s poem in theme, especially in the sense of almost religious awe in the face of the beauty and majesty of Nature… read it!

[More Analysis]

George MacBeth has quite a bit to say about today’s poem…

“This has great interest as one of the earliest poems written in England in syllabics, a metre later to be exploited by Thom Gunn and other poets. The mathematical principle underlying the syllabic form was not always appreciated by critics of Thomas, to whom the rhythms of this poem seemed flaccid and its metrical pattern purely visual and arbitrary. A syllabic metre depends on the presence of a given number of syllables in each line, but no given number of feet or stresses as in iambic or accentual verse, In this case the number of syllables per line in each stanza is as follows: 9,12,9,3,5,12,12,5,3,9. This number sequence is repeated throughout the poem. The effect is great ease and rapidity of movement combined with a delicate precision of form. Thomas contrives to retain the forcefulness of his earlier poetry by ending each line with a strong word, often a noun. This keeps the metre from becoming too loose.

The poem itself is an exquisitely gay and cheerful one. It describes how a man gets up early in the morning on his birthday and goes out for a walk through the country to a place where he can look down on the town where he lives. The man is almost certainly Thomas himself, and the town Swansea, where he was born.

The rhyme scheme of the poem is highly original. It seems to depend on normally using the same vowel sound but different consonants, so that the word ‘water’ can rhyme with the word ‘horse’. Thomas is not completely consistent about this, but he is consistent enough for the principle to be observable.”

– George MacBeth, Poetry 1900-1975.

Minstrels Links

There’s a brief biography of Dylan Thomas accompanying one of the very first poems to be run on the Wondering Minstrels, Thomas’ Prologue to his Collected Poems, at poem #14

Prologue is a denser work (both in sound and meaning) than Poem In October. Closer to today’s poem in form and spirit is the beautiful Fern Hill,
poem #138

The commentary accompanying Fern Hill has more material on compressed metaphors and syllabic verse; it also talks about Thomas’ poetic philosophy. You can learn more about the latter by reading everybody’s favourite Dylan Thomas poem, the utterly magnificent Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night, poem #38