Dylan Thomas 27 October 1914 – 9 November 1953

The Secret Gower

Surprisingly little has been made of the influence Gower had on Dylan Thomas’ writing.

There are constant echoes of the inspiration this beautiful peninsular brought to his life and poetry. In a letter to his potential lover, he wrote

‘There is bay almost too lovely to look at. You shall come and see it with me; we shall both utter words of maudlin wonder; and swoon away on the blasted heath’.

But there is more, far more in his poetry that can be traced back to his childhood and youth visits to this sleepy mystical land just a few miles from his home.

Mumbles with its spectacular lighthouse is the icon of Dylan Thomas’ Swansea and the illuminated gateway to Gower peninsular.

Just nineteen miles long, it is a land of legends, mysterious castles, and prehistoric secrets swept by shifting golden sands.

An enchanting rugged interior of dramatic hills, historic woodlands, sweeping moors seems to tumble into the surrounding sea over towering limestone cliffs or flow gently through silent yellow sand dunes. Lost villages are buried somewhere beneath the sands, but other relicts stand proudly as a reminder of the civilisations which existed long before time froze over Gower.

A dozen golden sandy beaches and myriads of hidden bays and rocky coves are scattered along miles of unspoilt and truly spectacular coastline, Gower is truly a living Welsh poem.

Dylan Thomas’ love of nature and his native countryside is legendary; it comes as no surprise that he used this magnificent land as the inspiration for many of his poems and stories.

About the Poems

Since Dylan Thomas’s first poem was published in 1933 readers have speculated on where his inspiration came from. After many years of following in his footsteps, I may have found the answer.

To me Dylan was like a photographer without a camera, someone who captured and stored visual images not on

film but in his mind. The world he saw was transient; everything came from the womb and ended in the tomb. He became fatalistic at a young age realising that he had been born now he was on his way to death.

He had a wonderful ability to recall what he saw and just like a photographer he learnt to see instead of just look. He saw the world as a jigsaw made up of infinite, intricate and ever-changing details. The constant interaction between the sea and the sky, the heron with the crab, man and nature, summer with winter. I has seen what Dylan saw and as a photographer, captured visual images.

But, Dylan Thomas’s true genius lay in his talent at combining what he saw with what he felt, what he experienced with what he remembered and then putting these complex thoughts into scintillating verse. His poems can be difficult to understand because of the very nature of what he is writing about.

In this radical collaboration between poet and photographer, image and text have been combined to provide a new way of viewing the poems.

Brian Gaylor

Brian Gaylor’s photographs present visual images drawn from the poetry and prose of Dylan Thomas.

My father was writing about these places and people fifty years ago, Brian has picked out the timeless images of leafy

woods and restless seas.

…sourced for their visual imagery, rich in poetic metaphor as might be expected but firmly anchored in real places

that still exist.

What gives this collection of photographs such vitality is Brian’s appreciation of my father’s zest for life in which nature

in all its moods is paramount.

The poems, which describe in lyrical terms the landscape, sea and rivers of Wales, [Gower] are simply illustrated in

the photographs as Brian’s photographic eye selects elements from these same locations.

Every photograph has an evocative quotation.

…the artful photographer has selected and linked an image with words, with word and image each in their own way

lend new interest to the other. I have found by looking at a particular image linked with words intriguing and

stimulating, prompting me to return to the original poem to read it in its entirety, my interest re-generated by Brian’s

densely rich image and his choice of related words to illustrate it.

Each photograph and accompanying text offers the same stimulation: a visual image that can act as an introductory

pathway to some of Dylan’s greatest and lesser known works.

Personally, after nearly fifty years of studying my father’s work, I find a new impetus in this exceptional photographic

collection to re-examine and enjoy the words and works from which the images took inspiration.

Aeronwy Thomas

1 9 4 3 – 2009

When the galactic sea was sucked

And all the dry seabed unlocked

I sent my picture scouting on the globe

That the globe itself of hair and bone

That, sewn to me by nerve and brain,

Had stringed my flask of matter to his rib

When Once the Twilight Locks No Longer

I have longed to move away

From the hissing of the spent lie

And the old terror’s continual cry

Growing more terrible as the day

Goes over the hill into the deep sea

I have longed to move away

From the repetition of salutes

For there are ghosts in the air

And ghostly echoes on paper

And the thunder of calls and notes

I Have Longed To Move Away

A process in the weather of the heart

Turns damp to dry: the golden shot

Storms in the freezing tomb.

A weather in the quarter of the veins

Turns night to day: blood in their suns

Lights up the living worm

A Process In The Weather Of The Heart

I have heard many years of telling

And many years should see some change

The ball I threw while playing in the park

Has not yet reached the ground

Should Lanterns Shine

The force that drives the water through the rocks

Drives my red blood; that dries the mouthing streams

Turns mine to wax.

And I am dumb to mouth unto my veins

How at the mountain spring the same mouth sucks.

The Force That Through the Green Face Drives the |Flower

Open a pathway through the slow sad sail,

Throw wide to the wind the gates of the wandering boat

For my voyage to begin to the end of my wound,

We heard the sea sound sing, we saw the salt sheet tell,

Lie still, sleep becalmed, hide the mouth in the throat,

Or we shall obey, and ride with you through the drowned.

Lie Still, Sleep Becalmed

In the beginning was the mounting fire

That set alight the weathers from a spark

A three-eyed, red-eyed spark, blunt as a flower,

Life rose and spouted from the rolling seas

Burst in the roots, pumped from the earth and rock

The secret oils that drive the grass

In the Beginning

I knew the message of the winter,

The darted hail, the childish snow,

And the wind was my sister suitor;

Wind in me leaped, the hellborn dew;

My veins flowed with the Eastern weather;

Ungotten I knew night and day

Before I Knocked

A process in the weather of the heart

Turns damp to dry; the golden shot

Storms in the freezing tomb,

A weather in the quarter of the veins

Turns night to day; blood in their suns

Lights up the living worm.

A Process in the Weather of the Heart

Sharp in my second breath I marked the hills, harvest

Of hemlock and blades, rust

My blood upon the tempered dead, forcing

My second struggling from the grass.

I Dreamed My Genesis

Shall gods be said to thump the clouds

When clouds are cursed by thunder,

Be said to weep when weather howls?

Shall rainbows be their tunics’ colours?

Shall Gods Be Said to Thump the Clouds

Before she lay on a stranger’s bed

With a hand plunged through her hair,

Or that rainy tongue beat back

Through the devilish years and innocent deaths

To the room of a secret child,

Among men later I heard it said

She cried her white dressed limbs were bare

And her red lips were kissed black

She wept in her pain and made mouths

Talked and tore though her eyes smiled

The Tombstone Told When She died

I prayed in the crouching room, by his blind bed,

In the muted house, one minute before

Noon, and night, and light. The rivers of the dead

Veined his poor hand I held, and I saw

Through his unseeing eyes to the roots of the sea,

(An old tormented man three-quarters blind,

Elegy

And she who lies,

Like exodus a chapter from the garden

Brand of the lily’s anger on her ring

Tugged through the days

Her ropes of heritage, the wars of pardon,

Of field and sand

The twelve triangles of the cherub wind

Engraving going.

A Grief Ago

Only the drowned deep bells

Of sheep and churches noise

Poor peace as the sun sets

And dark shoals every holy field.

We will ride out alone then,

Under the stars of Wales,

Cry, multitudes of arks! Across

The water lidded lands,

Manned with their loves they’ll move

Like wooden islands, hill to hill.

Prologue

No more may gulls cry at their ears

Or waves break loud on the sea shores;

Where blew a flower may a flower no more

Lifts its head to the blows of the rain;

Though they may be mad and dead as nails,

Heads of the characters hammer through daisies;

Break in the sun till the dun breaks down,

And death shall have no dominion

And Death Shall Have No Dominion

This world is half the devil’s and my own

Daft with the drug that’s smoking in a girl

And curling round the bud that forks her eye,

An old man’s shank one-marrowed with my bone,

And all the herrings smelling in the sea,

I sit and watch the worm beneath my nail

Wearing the quick away.

If I Were Tickled By the Rub of Love

In the thistledown fall,

He sings towards anguish; finches fly

In the claw tracks of hawks

On a seizing sky; small fishes glide

Through winds and shells of drowned

Ships towns to pastures of otters. He

In his slant, racking house

And the hewn coils of his trade

perceives

Herons walk in their shroud,

Poem On His Birthday

Shut, too, in a tower of words, I mark

On the horizon walking like the trees

The wordy shapes of women, and the rows

Of the star-gestured children in the park

Some let me make you of the vowelled beeches,

Some of the oaken voices, from the roots

Of many a thorny shire tell you the notes,

Some let me make you of the water’s speeches.

Especially When the October Wind

When I was a windy boy and a bit

And the black spit of the chapel fold,

(Sighed the old ram rod, dying of women),

I tiptoed shy in the gooseberry wood,

The rude owl cried like a tell-tale tit,

I skipped in a blush as the big girls rolled

Nine-pin down on donkey’s common,

And on seesaw Sunday nights I wooed

Whoever I would with my wicked eyes,

The whole of the moon I could love and leave

All the green leaved little weddings’ wives

In the coal black bush and let them grieve.

Lament

Hands grumble on the door,

Ships anchor off the bay,

Rain beats the sand and slates

Shall I let in the stranger,

Shall I welcome the sailor,

Or stay till the day I die?

Hands of the stranger and holds of the ships

Hold you poison or grapes?

Ears in the Turrets Hear

I fled the earth and, naked, climbed the weather,

Reaching a second ground far from the stars;

And there we wept, I and a ghostly other,

My mothers-eyed, upon the tops of trees;

I fled that ground as lightly as a feather

I Fellowed Sheep

Invisible, your clocking tides

Break on the lovebeds of the weeds;

The weed of love’s left dry;

There round about your stones the shades

Of children who go, from their voids,

Cry to the dolphined sea.

Where Once the Waters of Your Face

Flower, flower the people’s fusion

O light in zenith, the couple bud

And the flame in the flesh’s vision.

Out at sea, the drive of oil,

Socket and grave, the brassy blood

Flower, flower, all all and all

All All And All The Dry World’s Lever

Fishermen of mermen

Creep and harp on the tide, sinking their charmed, bent pin

With bridebait of gold bread, I with a living skein,

Tongue and ear in the thread, angle the temple-bound

Curl-locked and animal cavepools of spells and bone,

Trace out a tentacle,

Nailed with an open eye, in the bowl of wounds and weed

To clasp my fury on ground

And clap its great blood down;

Never shall the beast be born to atlas the few seas

Or poise the day on a horn.

How Shall My Animal

About Brian Gaylor

Brian Gaylor’s life has in many ways mirrored his predecessor Dylan Thomas. They grew up in Swansea a

short walk across the ugly, lovely town, by the side of a long and splendid curving shore. This sea-town

was their world. They both loved and visited the beautiful Gower peninsular as child and adult and both

had strolled across the golden sands of the bay almost too lovely to look at.

Over the years Brian has become a renowned photographer of the Welsh landscape and in the last decade developed an interest in the relationships between the visual image and poetry. Now for the first time, there is collaboration between the poet and the photographer showing not only the beauty but also the influence Gower had on Dylan Thomas and his writing.

What would Dylan have thought of images being combined with his poetry? Dylan’s daughter Aeronwy, just before her tragic death, told Brian that her father would be “Delighted and tickled pink at the thought.”

Focal View supports creative photography ; providing a range of services including gallery presentation, image critiquing, creating page-turning e-portfolios and books. We run competitions and tuition

through the Thoughts and Perspectives series and also the Focal View Photographic Course

Copyright Publication

All of the photographic images in this publication are the intellectual property of Brian Gaylor FRPS. Mphil.

Any reproduction of this publication in any format, including printing out onto hard copy is not permitted.

None of the images may be copied for any use except where written permission is granted on application through Focalview.

www.focalview.co.uk

Text

The poems of Dylan Thomas are freely available as text on the internet and there are no copyright restrictions other than those

which may apply to particular sources.

Images

Focalview

Service Links

Portfolios Critiquing Focal View Competition Perspectives When We Were There Photographic Course

Hotels and Guest Houses Thoughts Travel Photographers Free E-Book

Email: editor@focalview.co.uk