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| The Boathouse where Dylan Thomas lived |
Dylan Thomas died when I was eight - in 1953. A hopeless drunk, he inspired us with his call to his father:
Do not go gentle into that good night, rage, rage against the dying of the light. I kept the New Directions paperback edition of his poems near me and loved the radio play Under Milk Wood which we staged at the Fenwick Theater at Holy Cross.
Climbing along a steep coastal path through a forest in southern Wales, with russet red and tawny brown autumn leaves crunching beneath my feet, I reached a crest where the trailhead looked back onto a long estuary lined with salt flats. The River Taf ran through the headlands before me, its glacier-cut course unmistakable alongside the grass-covered cliffs on either side. The sea spread out before me, a moody canvas of blues and gray. White-topped gorse and cherry-red currant bushes gave color to my panorama, the plaintive chorus of sea birds the only soundtrack.
I’d come to Wales, and to this spot specifically, to follow in the footsteps of Dylan Thomas, the Welsh-born poet who made this walk famous in his 1944 “Poem in October.”
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| inside the shed where Dylan Thomas wrote daily |
1 comment:
To almost begin the post by calling the great poet a 'hopeless drunk' seems a bit unfair. Perhaps, had he remained in that beautiful seaside inspiring aerie & poet's retreat, and not ended up infamously in the still operating in NYC Whitehorse Tavern, challenged to imbibing the max number of straight shots possible, he'd have gone quite differently into that good night, and perhaps drunkard t'would not be the first thought in his epitath.
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