Literary Criticism: Dylan Thomas Sang in October

In his “Poem in October” Dylan Thomas describes in great detail his thirtieth birthday, which he celebrates in his hometown of Swansea, Wales, a small fishing village. He walks through the town very early in the morning, while its other inhabitants are still asleep, heading for the hill. He reflects on his life so far, marvelling the nature around him and is content to stay there, on the hill, observing nature around him, taking joy in it, till the weather makes an abrupt change. In that change, he seems to relive moments of his childhood, and a great feeling of joy surges through the poet, as the joys and mysteries of life seem to dance around him.
The poem is nothing short of delightful. Thomas uses the syllabic metre to great effect, for although there is no specified number of stresses, the number of syllables per line is specified. Thus, the syllables in each line in each stanza run: 9,12,9,3,5,12,12,5,3,9. Due to this metre, the poem can only be read at a certain pace, the words rolling along, thus giving the poem a flow and ease that, apart from the beauty it lends, create the feeling that the reader is alternately walking along with the poet though the town, swaying in the wind with the trees and streaming along with the other waves in the tide. Of course this is not the only technique used by Thomas in this poem, for we see again the use of the compressed metaphor, a common feature in his poetry. Here, the compressed metaphors enhance the effect created by the syllabic metre, in that they aid the flow of the poem, and enrich it, by adding another layer of intricacy.
Thomas Begins his poem with his moment of awakening, saying that his birthday “woke to my (his) hearing” with the sounds of nature, such as the “call of seagull and rook” and the “praying” of water. Early in the morning he walks to the hill overlooking the town where he grew up. Climbing above a rainstorm, he comes to a sunny patch on the hill, and something he sees stirs a recollection; suddenly he is flooded by the memory of walking there in summer, as a child, with his mother. For an instant he is overwhelmed by the past, by the feelings and knowledge he had as a child that now blend with and elevate his adult perceptions. Moved to tears, he prays that this experience will repeat itself in his lifetime.
In “Poem in October” the “central seed” is the story of what the poet did on his birthday, and several kinds of “building up and breaking down of the images” may be observed within the compass of a single line. One particularly rich set of metaphors is initiated in the second line of the poem: “Woke to my hearing from harbour and neighbour wood.” “Woke” carries its common meaning in this line: the poem’s setting is early morning on the poet’s birthday. The poet awakes; then the town awakes, too, once the poet is securely beyond its limits:

I took the road
Over the border
And the gates
Of the town closed as the town awoke.

But from the outset “woke” signals a symbolic action as well, an action linked with psychological change: the crossing over the border from the October of computed time to the “summer noon” of recaptured time, from an ordinary to an ecstatic state of consciousness. As the poet woke, so too the inner meaning of his birthday woke—not to his sight (which responds to appearances, to the surface of things) but to his “hearing,” which links him to “heaven,” with the aid of the heron (who acts as heaven’s earthly mediator, or priest). Heaven beckons him by ear: in the praying of water, the call of seagull and rook, the knock of boats on a net webbed wall. And Thomas courts our comprehension by ear as well, in the numerous internal rhymes and half-rhymes that sing out in these lines: year, shore; heaven, hearing, heron; harbour, neighbour; heron, beckon, second; mussel, call, seagull, wall; woke, rook, knock; foot, forth. Thomas seems in fact to have been careful in this stanza to avoid imagery that is concretely visual. It is difficult, for example, to make visual sense of such statements as “the morning beckon” or “water praying.” Even “the net webbed wall” supplies greater auditory precision to the sound the boats make. Hearing, not sight, is the dominant sense throughout “Poem in October” because hearing is a path by which imaginative truth reaches us, via story and song, all our lives, perhaps especially during childhood. This is why, when Thomas has fully recrossed the border separating manhood from childhood, he finds a mother walking a child “through the parables / Of sun light / And the legends of the green chapels / And the twice told fields of infancy” (italics added) while the memory culminates in a recovery of the power to hear “the true / joy of the long dead child” and to sing that same heart’s truth again.
Another set of metaphors is bred from the second half of the line: “Woke to my hearing from harbour and neighbour wood.” A polarity between the harbor from which the poet sets out and the hill to which he climbs is established immediately. As the poem develops, movement from present to past is reflected in a gradual change in the source of imagery, from water to garden. Water, through its associations with time and change in the poem, is contrasted with the stability of a certain memory: a childhood scene lit by eternal sunlight, an earthly paradise. This birthday is a rebirth-day, and Thomas is summoned to it by flowing water, falling water:

I rose
In rainy autumn
And walked abroad in a shower of all my days.

Water praying, water birds flying his name, a springful of larks, and bushes brimming with blackbirds all assist in converting the solid ground of ordinary life into a fluid context for the dissolving of present into past, man into child, common into holy. The poem is drenched with the sight and sound of moving water until stanza five, where the weather turns around, and “streamed” denotes the flow of wonder, like sunlight, illuminating a place fixed in memory:

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.
As a consequence of Thomas’s technique of composition—letting images breed, producing “a sequence of creations, recreations, destructions, contradictions”—any of his poems, including “Poem in October,” contains elements impossible to integrate with a paraphrase of the story line. A single reading—even better, a single hearing—illustrates this. “Poem in October” is Thomas at his best. His use of language is so arresting, musical, vital, and, finally, sacramental that his poetry usually appeals to readers at once—especially if they are listening to his recorded readings of it—whether or not they are following his meaning. Thomas’s poetry opens what the Anglo-Saxons called our “word-hoard,” the large coffers of our language (of which our personal use is likely to be paltry in daily life). Nonetheless, “Poem in October” does have a theme similar to that of the passage from Proust discussed earlier: the joy of childhood, symbolic of the poet’s original creative power, and the recapturing of that joy, symbolic of the renewing of that creative power.
The Child as Symbol
Thomas ends his birthday poem with a prayer that he may sustain the vision into which he has been reborn that day:
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.
If we are not too enchanted by Thomas’s lovely rhetoric, we might as adults stop here to question the implication of these last lines, the idea that his birthday windfall of momentary escape into the happier past might actually have some significance for the future. To understand this hope, we must understand the meaning Thomas associates with “the long dead child” who has been temporarily revitalized in the living man. The boy in “Poem in October” is not simply young Dylan Marlais Thomas. He is, rather, the Child: a human being at an early stage of cognitive development, a mind that has not fully developed the powers of reason and still maintains a “primal sympathy” with nature.