ALAN YOUNG

Image as Structure and Poetic Meaning

333

: Dylm Thomas.

The short-lived but vigorous appearance of Surrealism in England in the mid- Thirties caused Dylan Thomas, then in his early twenties and trying to publish a second volume of verse, a good deal of trouble. Richard Church, acting for Dent, had to be convinced that Thomas’s latest poems had not been written under the influence of Surrealism; Church held strong views about the bad influence of the latest London craze, as his letter to Thomas in November, 1935, made plain:

Dissociated symbolism is a private eccentricity, and there is no reason why a reader should tease his wits or liis imagination to elucidate a meaning where possibly there may be none. Surrealism is to me an anti-social advity, and therefore destructive. I am distressed to see its pernicious effect in your work, because I believe you to be outstanding among your generation as a poet with an original personality and the fine fire of spiritual passion. There are not many such today?

Some recently completed poems sent to him by Thomas (and which Dent published the following year in Twenty-five Poems) were particularly distasteful- to Church:

The new group on which you are working I cannot stand for, because I do not believe that it is really you speahng. It is only you caught up in the delirium of intellectual fashion of the moment?

This ‘new group’ included seven of the final total of ten poems of the sonnet- sequence ‘Altarwise by owl-light’ on which Thoma was working during Summer 1935, and the long poem ‘I, in my intricate image’ which he had completed in March, 1935.

Thomas’s reply to Church denied the influence of Surrealism, a movement which Thomas also believed to be ‘a purposely unreasonable experiment inimical to poetry,’ and he stated modestly but firmly his own belief in full poetic meaningfulness:

I think I do know what some of the main faults of my writing are: Immature violence, rhythmic monotony, frequent muddleheadedness, and a very much overweighted imagery that leads too often to incoherence. But every line is meant to be understood; the reader is meant to understand every poem by thinking and feeling about it, and not by sucking it in through his pores, or whatever he is meant to do with surrealist writing. Neither is the new group on which I am working influenced, in any way, by an experiment with which I am totally unfamiliar.)

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Thomas’s claim to be ‘totally unfamiliar’ with the surrealist experiment would seem to be contradicted by his own reference, in a review which had appeared in The Adelphi in February, 1935, to ‘the paranoic hallucination so zealously cultivated by the continental surrealist.” But it is odd that what Thomas claimed consistently and often angdy - that his writing was not at any time influenced by Surrealism - has been so often disregarded or even challenged by critics who wish to see either surrealist-inspiredfnssons in it or surrealist- type irresponsibility in both his life and his work.

What prompted Church to see such influence in the group of poems which Thomas had just sent to him also probably inspired one of the first definite identifications of a surrealist allusion in a poem by Thomas. In a short essay published in Wales in August, 1937, H. L. R. Edwards discussed the use of literary allusion in the work of Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot, arguing that their success - especially Eliot’s - had intensified the problem of communication by encouraging the use of private references in the work of younger poets:

If we forgot the surrealists, the present tendency is to see how far private references will ‘make sense’ poetically. Auden tried it in the Orators: with imperfect success. And one wonders what the reader of Dylan Thomas, who is unfamiliar with Mason’s etching, will make of:

Thus the shadowless man or ox, and the pictured devil, In seizure of silence commit the dead nuisance:,

AII of which, however, is a new story .5

The two lines referred to by Edwards are from ‘I, in my intricate image’ which was written between December, 1934, and March, 1935, and doubtless was one of the poems which had prompted Church’s stern letter. It appeared in the August-September issue of New Verse in 1935 with the title ‘A Poem in Three Parts,’ the first section including the two lines in question :

I, in my intricate image, stride on two levels, Forged in man’s minerals, the brassy orator Laying my ghost in metal, The scales of this twin world tread on the double, My half ghost in amour hold hard in death’s corridor, To my man-iron sidle.

Beginning with doom in the bulb, the spring unravels, Bright as her spinning-wheels, the colic season Worked on a world of petals; She threads off the sap and needles, blood and bubble Casts to the pine roots, raking man like a mountain Out of the naked entrail.

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Beginniig with doom in the ghost, and the springing marvels, Image of images, my metal phantom Forcing forth through the harebell, My man of leaves and the bronze root, mortal, unmortal, I, in my fusion of rose and male motion, Create this twin miracle. This is the fortune of m a n h d : the natural peril, A steeplejack tower, bonerailed and masterless, No death more natural ; Thus the shadowless man or ox, and the pictured devil, In seizure of silence commit the dead nuisance: The natural parallel. My images stalk the trees and the slant sap’s tunnel, No tread more perilous, the green steps and spire Mount on man’s footfall, I with the wooden insect in the tree of nettles, In the glass bed of grapes with snail and flower, Hearing the weather fall. Intricate manhood of ending, the invalid rivals, Voyaging dockwise off the symboled harbour., Finding the water final, On the consumptives’ terrace taking their two farewells, Sail on the level, the departing adventure, To the sea blown arrival.

As Edwards suggested, lines 4 and 5 of the fourth stanza do appear deliberately to point to a specific analogy and reference, and Edwards may have been right that Thomas had in mind one of Masson’s drawings, though I have been unable to discover anythmg completed by Masson before 1937 which would support his suggestion.6 A relatively private and esoteric allusion in this poem would not be entirely out of the question. At the time he was working on it . he was living in London with the Swansea artists, Alfred Janes and Mervyn Levy; a good deal of his time seems to have been spent in discussing painters and their work, especially with Janes who was, like Thomas, of a religious and metaphysical turn of mind.

Equally well, however, the allusion in these two lines may be seen in rather less esoteric terms. The image of man-ox-devil which these two lines invoke is to be found in a mythlcal creature appropriately brought up-to-date in the violent and convoluted Thirties - the Minotaur. The French periodical Minotaure, which appeared between 1933 and 1939, was the vehicle by means of which the surrealists sought to give wider publicity to their movement outside France. Early issues contained Andre Breton’s famous essays ‘Picasso dans son element’ and ‘La beaute sera convulsive,’ and much work of interest to the English appeared in its pages. The seventh issue (1935) contained

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Herbert Read’s ‘Why the English have no taste’ and other articles which referred to Edward Young, Wuthering Heights, and Swinburne. As David Gascoyne wrote in his A Short Suruey of Surrealism (1935):

Until recently the surrealists had very seldom contributed to any but their own reviews; in 1933, however, they decided that in order to reach a new and wider public they would collaborate in the publication of Minotaure, a magdicently produced but somewhat expensive review, well known in this country.’

The front-covers of Minotaure were always variations of aspects of the legend of the Minotaur, usually incorporating the bull-man and, sometimes the Labyrinth. Marcel Duchamp contributed an abstract Labyrinth for the front- cover of the sixth issue in Winter, 1935, but Masson’s cover did not appear until the final double issue (nos. 12-13) in 1939. The most famous of these covers had been supplied for the first issue in May, 1933, by Picasso, whose preoccupation with the Minotaur legend had begun in the late-Twenties.

During the period between 1927 and 1937, Picasso had produced many etchings representing the life of his Minotaur, and these drawings were also fairly well-known in England. According to Sir Ronald Penrose in his picasso: His Life and Work, these drawings belong to a phase in Picasso’s career when he had a certain amount of sympathy for the surrealists; the famous picture The Three Dancers (1925) coincided with the surrealists’ greatest enthusiasm for Picasso (in Breton’s Le Suw&lisme et la Peinture), and this painting inaugurated ‘a new epoch in which monsters are to play a major role.’ The Minotaure was one of Picasso’s monsters, one which has been claimed as belonging to Picasso’s most surrealistic phase.’

Picasso’s front-cover for the first Minotaure was a remarkable collage of corrugated paper, fragments of paper doily, and leaves, in the middle of which was a drawing of the Minotaure creature with a man’s body, but with a bull’s head and tail. In his right hand, the Minotaure holds an object which could be a dagger with a flame-shaped blade, or perhaps a candle or torch with a blade-shaped flame. The ‘blade’ or ‘flame’ echoes the leaf motif found elsewhere in the collage. It is not too ridiculous to see the object as a mirror (as Picasso was later to do)’ or as a phallus.

The possibility of saying for certain whether Thomas was thinkin3 of Picasso’s famous cover, or of any of the Minotaur drawings by Picasso or others, would not really matter, it seems to me, unless the ‘allusion’ were in some way involved not simply in the two lines referred to, but, more importantly, in the central meaning of the whole poem. I am not trying to suggest that the poem may be reduced to these elusive allusions: any attempt to produce schemata of meaning or methd for Thomas’s poems would have to counter the completely convincing case against such reductivism by Ralph

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Maud in the second chapter (‘Explications and Explanations’) of his Entrances to Dylan Thomas’ Poetry” as well as the perhaps even more definitive statement made by Thomas himself at precisely the time he was at work on this poem:

You asked me to tell you about my theory of poetry. Really, I haven’t got one. I like things that are difficult to write and difficult to understand; I like ‘redeeming the contraries’withsecretiveimages; Ilikecontradictingmyimages,sayingtwothings atonce in one word, four in two and one in six. But what I like isn’t a theory even if I do stabilise by dogma my own perscmal affections. Poetry, heavy in tare though nimble, should be as orgiastic and organic as copulation, dividing and undying, personal but not private, propagating the individual in the mass and the mass in the individual. I think it should work from words from the substance of words and the rhythm of substantial words set together, not towards words. Poetry is a medium, not a stigmata on paper. Men should be two tooled, and a poet’s middle leg is his pencil. If his phallic pencil turns into an electric drill, breaking up the tar and the concrete of language worn thii by the tricycle tyres of nature poets and the heavy six wheels of the academic sirs, so much the better; and it’s work that counts, madam, genius so often being a capacity for aching pains.”

The curious thing is that this passage (from a letter to Charles Fisher) makes one realise that the Minotaur’s held object might also have been seen as a pencil or pen, or as a paintbrush. What I am proposing, in philosophical terms, is that the images of a Thomas poem make sense mainly within a coherence theory of poetic meaning and truth rather than within a correspondence theory. The poem coheres as an artistic unity only if the actual ‘correspondences’ are assimilated into the heart of the poem, taking a new life in the poem.

As I will now try to show, a Minotaur-Labyrinth image may be not simply an inessential illustration within the poem, but, rather, a useful model of the poem’s structure and meaning. Thomas’s poem, like Picasso’s (and Masson’s) studies of the Minotaur, is a metaphorical quest, an attempt to discover the secret of a Labyrinth. The original legend of Theseus’s quest to kill the man- devouring monster, the Minotaur, and to return safely through the Labyrinth had already been transformed in Picasso’s imagination so that his Minotaurs were themselves profound explorations of the meaning of the human - attempts to understand the strange combination of savage animality and near- divinity which constitutes the human. Thomas’s poem makes fully coherent sense only if the shape of the poem is seen as a narrative in which the persona, on a quest for self-hood, is also searching for the secret of all natural life. The search for the meaning of the self is also an attempt to understand and to come to terms with a number of metaphysical paradoxes (Blake’s ‘contraries’), including, especially, the horrifying fact of death in eternally self-renewing nature. Thomas’s poem is a quest for the meaning of man, who is himself a

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perplexing ‘Labyrinth of images, in the only viable method of enquiry, the language of art. The poem coheres only if these images make a meaningfully structured whole. I believe that they do so, and that Thomas’s poem is, in consequence, one of the most complex and powerfully sustained imaginative achievements in modem poetry, even though it does set immense difficulties for any reader unable or unwilling to devote considerable time and patience to unravelling its frustratingly entangled meanings.

I must confess at this point that though I am certain that Thomas did make use of allusions to images from various works of art I am less than entirely convinced that Picasso’s Minotaure-Labyrinth image was one of them. A reference to Picasso is, of course, more plausible than one to Masson, especially since Masson’s work may have appeared after Thomas’s poem had been completed. Thomas and his friends included the subject of Picasso in the famous discussions in the Swansea Kardomah, and Thomas himself never denounced Picasso as he did the surrealists. Nevertheless, I am conscious of having sheltered behind Edwards’s suggestion in order to offer what may seem to be only a rather less dubious counter-suggestion. The real value of the Minotaure-Labyrinth analogy is to provide a useful hypothetical model for Thomas’s structural sense, as well as to suggest a mode of imaginative intelligence in Thomas which is easily, even wilfully, misunderstood by some of his critics. If the poem has a thread of meaning running through all its images then perhaps we should be able to discover this thread at the beginning of the journey through the poem’s Labyrinth? If it is possible to counter Lita Hornick’s claim that ‘No concrete central h of locale or event emerges but only the revolving of an incredibly rich accumulation of image and allusion around a central subject’*’ then we should be able to pick up a thread in the first stanza.

Both Clark Emery and William York Tindall, two of Thomas’s best American critics, have seized upon the first word, ‘I,, and have seen the poem as a narrative which takes the author on yet another journey into his personality and his work; thus TindaU:

I, the first and most important word, adequately introduces the hero of this lyrical history and states the subject. The ‘intricate image,’ in which he strides, treads and sidles like a crab, is double, at once his persona and his poetry. Both are metallic coverings and masks for their sensitive creator, who is active on “two levels” by virtue of his double facade. As “brassy orator” or young poet with a lot of brass, he lays his ghost or spirit in the metal of a printer’s forme.

So Tindall begins his responsive analysis of the poem, following these two levels through all three sections. Finery, too, sees the starting-point in the double image of the poet’s persona :

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The locale is darkest Thomas; the time is that of a signzcant turning point in Thomas’s life, the p in t in his life at which, through the acquisition of the grace fourfold vision, he effects the transition from natural man to imaginative man. The hero, I, is Thomas the muge who, in the process of growth, has created the “twin miracle’’ of body and (for want of a better word) soul, but whose magic has not thu for availed to bring them to a working partnership. The wents of a poem occur in a circular voyage of self-discovery made by these two dissidents (the one a too-fleshly Lancelot, the other a too-Tennysonian Galahad) which brings them to d t y . Thus the I, who at the beginning is really ego 1 plus ego 2, comes to his oneness; darkest Africa is avilized; Prosper0 heals Hamlet.”

Emery’s account offers, and his analysis of the poem provides, a richer and more thoughtful journey than does Tindall’s, but I think that both failed to see just how intricate and universal this starting-point really is. The insistence on ‘twoness’ in the first stanza should have put an interpreter on his guard for something more complex. The first problem is that two levels do not really constitute intricacy, even if we concede that ‘brassy orator’ contains elements of self-mocking humour, and that there is complex ambiguity in ‘laying my ghost,’ which may mean writing poetry for publication, writing poetry to ‘fix’ the unfixable spirit, or self-discovery throu,gh the act of writing poetry. All these meanings are probably intended, and they may be followed through the poem, but they do not seem to me to be even the most important thread leading from this opening stanza.

How intricate the image really is becomes apparent only when we realise that the ‘brassy orator’ is already both levels, and so too is ‘my ghost in metal.’ This gives us another thread from stanza 1 - yet another second level - to make the poem an enactment in every kind of word-play at Thomas’s disposal of a metaphysical problem of universal significance about which he was deadly serious, that of the relationship between spirit and matter; how is spirit possible? During the course of the poem, t h e problem set in the first stanza is examined through the narrative of a man who is a part of nature, and who knows that all natural things die. Spirit is a part of man’s natural body, or an aspect of his bodily functions: therefore nature’s lesson is that man’s spirit, if he has one, dies with his body. Is there my clue in this visionary journey through nature’s Labyrinth to a way out? Throughout the search for the exit the matter-spirit image moves as one, body imd sod inextricably fused.

‘Stride,’ ‘forged,’ ‘minerals,’ ‘brassy,’ ‘metal,’ ‘scales,’ ‘tread,’ ‘armour,’ ‘man-iron, ’ all emphasise the solidity, the heavy thereness of material substance ; the repetition of ideas of twoness (two levels, twin world, on the double, half ghost, and man-irons, which chain or manacle the two things together, and scales, which suggest a balance of two parts) and of something non-material (‘image, ’ ‘orator, ’ ‘ghost, ’ and ‘double’) connect matter and spirit in a sinister setting (noting the serio-comic force - like the German Expressionist films

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.which Thomas so much admired - of ‘laying my ghost,’ ‘tread,’ ‘hold hard,’ ‘death’s corridor,’ and ‘sidle’ to suggest the haunted place). The riddle of the Labyrinth is asked in the first stanza - man is spirit fused with matter, material soul ; he cannot escape from any Labyrinth in nature because he is made of the self-same stuff.

The six verses of Part I follow an argument closely. If soul and matter are inextricably interfused, and matter is a part of the natural order, then sod, like body, must finally decay and die. This thread is followed through a tortuous but perfectly logical sequence of ideas and images beginning (stanza 2) with a series with natural and material associations, followed (stanza 3) by a parallel series of equally natural but more abstract ones, though we are always made aware of the inherence of the abstract within the material (‘my metal phantom,’ ‘the bronze root’) and of the natural end of man, alongside the fact that this particular natural man is a poet too (‘my man of leaves’).

Difficulties arise from the sheer variety of the terms in which these image- clusters are worked out and interrelated. Stanza 2 meditates on the creation of man and all natural things in relation to Spring seen as a creator, a spinner of natural, organic materials (petals, sap, needles, blood, pine roots) into Man, thus identdying him with all these vegetable and animal constituents. Stanza 3 is yet another cluster, with an effective play on ‘harebell’ to suggest mystic flower and metal, the shape of the birth passage and the phallus, a pattern of image taken up in ‘rose and male motion.’ The fourth stanza considers the skeleton and man’s sexual nature (again, both intricately imaged together, and W e d with al l preceding image-clusters) in confirming the ‘natural parallel.’

The next stanza develops the idea of a journey in the imagination of this material-spiritual word-spinner, a journey through nature and time - the ‘death’s corridor’ of stanza 1 - and this journey is developed in the six stanzas of Part II and completed in Part ID, where salvation or hope are found - rather abruptly, according to Tindall - only with considerable effort on the reader’s part, perhaps in the fact and act of repduction itself, the mysterious agency of Love - ‘Love like a mist or fire through the bed of eels,’ - or, as I think just as likely in the poet’s recognition through all the poem that there is something astonishing andmysterious inthe imagesof manandnaturethroughout the journey.

It is not my aim to make a full critical analysis of all the images and lines of this poem, but one particular stage of the journey deserves closer attention because it does present typical difficulties for the reader, difficulties which are c a d by Thomas’s method of taking off into different image-clusters which then interconnect to cause for the ordinary reader, even after several readings, image-muddles. The first stanzas of Part II are worth considering in detail because they (or, rather, one word in stanza 2) have been used to demonstrate Dylan Thomas’s irresponsibility towards his craft. Here is Part II of the poem:

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They climb the country pinnacle, Twelve winds encounter by the white host at pasture, Corner the mounted meadows in the hill corral; They see the squirrel stumble, The haring snail go giddily round the flower, A quarrel of weathers and trees in the windy spiral.

As they dive, the dust settles, The cadaverous gravels, falls thick and steadily, The highroad of water where the seabear and mackerel Turn the long sea arterial Turning a petrol face blind to the enemy Tunring the riderless dead by the channel wall.

(Death instrumental, Splitting the long eye open, and the spud turnkey, Your corkscrew grave centred in navel and nipple, The neck of the nostril, Under the mask and the ether, they making bloody The tray of knives, the antiseptic funeral;

Bring out the black patrol, Your monstrous officers and the decaying army, The sexton sentinel, garrisoned under thistles, A codc-on-a-dunghill Crowing to Lazarus in the morning is vanity, Dust be your Saviour under the conjured soil.)

As they drown, the chime travels, Sweetly the diver’s bell in the steeple of spinclrift Rings out the Dead Sea scale ; And, dapped in water till the triton dangles, Strung by the flaxen whale-weed, from the hangman’s raft, Hear they the salt glass breakers and the tongues of burial.

(Turn the sea-spindle lateral, The grooved land rotating, that the stylus of lightning Dazzle this face of voices on the moon-turnetl table, Let the wax disk babble shames and the damp dishonours, the relic scraping. These are your years’ recorders. The circular. world stands still.

In ‘Metaphor and maturity: T. F. Powys rmd Dylan Thomas’ (1961), David Holbrook set out to demolish Thomas’s reputation once and for all, to show the poems to be immature, poetically irresponsible, and largely meaningless:

Dylan Thomas’s very reputation rests on a idisabling amorality, leading towards the trivial and ultimately the inarticulate. In metaphor he was impotent, while his verse is

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more devoid of meaning than most readers are prepared to admit. Ivlr. John Bayley (also, in the end, approving) writes thus on the line:

Turning a petrol blind face to the enemy If I am right in supposing that petrol is there purely because its inertness as a word corresponds to the meaningless inertia of death - Thomas might presumably have said apron, or bamboo, or income to get the same effect . . . (The Romantic Simtival) Exactly - ‘where there’s a will and a slight delirium there’s a way’ as this poet himself said of his work. Indeed, of his own poetry he frequently said such things as: ‘as far as he knew it had no meaning at all’ or ‘some of them may be poems’ or ‘to read one’s pwms aloud is to let the cat out of the bag’. And thus, although there is at times an emotive pressure (as lies somewhere behind such a poem as ‘If my head hurt a hair’s foot’) and at times a flair for arranging words into patterns that have the appearance of poetry, there is almost always a total absence of control towards order and of those verbal expeditions into unploughed experience which are metaphor. Significantly, in his letters, he discusses words, their flavour, but seldom the meaning sought.15

We may let pass the misquotation of the line under discussion (uncorrected even in later issues of the Pelican Guide where this essay first appeared), but the criticism itself contains two fundamental fallacies which cannot be overlooked.

First, if Holbrook is right, and metaphor is ‘verbal expeditions into unploughed experience’ then it is surely unjust to criticise a poet writing to other poets (most of whom understood his meaning well enough) for failing to discuss ‘meaning’ in other, simpler terms. If poetry could be accurately paraphrased then there would be no special need for poetry. Poetry cannot be reduced, if it is real poetry, to simpler language forms, though a critic may be able to show the main lines of the logic of a poem.’A poet cannot be blamed, however, for being unwilling to do this, or for not wanting to discuss the creative process (which is quite different from the internal logic of the finished poem, in any case). All the remarks of the type which Holbrook quoted were made during the American visits when Thomas was tired and sick, and certainly not interested in producing balanced assessments of his own work.

Holbrook’s second fallacy is, I believe, a more serious one, and, in a critic, an inexcusable one. He clearly supposes that he may read part of a poem by Thomas without making any serious effort. To read any poem properly requires a sort of critical faith in the poet’s knowing what he was about. In the absence of such faith, the necessary patience and critical attention is usually absent too, and the critic should remain silent.

To return to the poem. Part II, stanza 2 of which contains the controversial word ‘petrol,’ continues the journey of spirit-matter, soul-body, down and around ‘death’s corridor.’ It is at once a journey of dreadful confirmation that death is the harbour to which all natural things return - and an enactment of

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all man’s spiritual longings, including the desperate attempt to shake the spirit free from the dying flesh. If there is more significance in ‘petrol’ than either Bayley or Holbrook sees in it, then there nnust be some way of undoing this apparent tangle, some thread-end of which we can take hold.

The answer lies, I believe, in a very simple but intricately worked reference. The poet, who is representative Man, both ghost and machine, is on a journey. All journeys through death’s corridor, are circular, in that they begin and end in the same place, getting nowhere. Not onliy this, but the would-be visionary journey is up and down too, therefore a spiral. From the top of this spiral the travellers see, as from the poet’s tower of words, all other natural things journeying towards the same death. All the time they are buffeted about by the contrary winds of hope and despair; the “white host at pasture’ is the wheat of the Bread of Life but also the parasite-ridden flesh. At the bottom of the spiral they join, with a crash, the dying things of nature. The central image which holds all this cluster together is a well-known form of popular entertainment which Thomas would have seen in his youth, the many symbolic possibilities of which are developed fully here. The ‘Wall of Death’ was the name given to a spectacular display of motor-cycling ski l l and hazard in which the Wall of Death rider, sometimes blindfolded, spiralled his machine up the sheer inside walls of a cylindrical track. At the right speed, the rider defeated the forces which would bring rider and machine down to the bottom.

This poem, too, is also a journey on the Wall of Death. The country creatures and all living things, the creatures of the sea, and man - both matter and spirit - end their lives’ journeys at the same place. The journey is hazardous, starting with the slow climb up the ramp to get to the right speed, and then the continual rapid cornering and spiralling begins. As they climb they see the dying of all things, with just a glimmer of hope, perhaps, as they reach the windy top of the spiral.

Then the descent - the scene changing to a sea-view, where the fish turn in the turning sea which leaves its dead by the circular harbour wall, the same harbour from which all journeys began, andl the same wall, Death. The water which turns against the harbour wall, and in which the dead and dying fish turn, and the wooden wall around which the blindfolded motor-cyclists spiral, are brought together with vivid images of a real and ruined journey by land and sea. The seabear and mackerel turn in the sea; the long sea-road itself turns (like the motorcyclist’s cylindrical road) in ithe spiralling food-chain of the sea, and, at the harbour walls lie the dead machines, the dead metals which carried and surrounded and were, intricately, the dead riders.

It is the sea at the harbour wall which has a petrol face, and the walls of the pit have a petrol face; the petrol is the spilt or used fuel, now useless, from so many voyages ending in the enemy of all natural creation, death. ”he word

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‘petrol,’ then, far from being a merely arbitrary usage, has the important function of binding the two involved spiralling dusters together. Creatures of the land and sea (iridescent dead floating fish and the petrol-soaked riders and their crashed machines) all spirit and all matter meet at the base of the Wall of Death.

The Labyrinth hypothesis has been useful, I feel, in getting closer to the meaning of this poem, and some of its images sti l l seem to me to take their meaning from the same family as the Minotaur’s sword-flame-phallus-pen. For instance, the lines

Death instrumental Splitting the long eye open, and the spiral turnkey, Your corkscrew grave centred in navel and nipple. (Part II, lines 13-15)

and

Suffer the slash of vision bv the fin-green stubble (part III, line 13)

do seem to have something in common, as Paul C. Ray has pointed out’’ , with surrealist images of slit phallic eyes (as in Bunuel’s Un Chien Andalou and Victor Brauner’s painting of 1927 showing an eye where the human genitals should be). But the spiralling image dominates these, so that the imaginary journey is also into and out of the womb, up and down the birth-passage. The mysteries of sex and birth, in Thomas’s early imagination, are always associated with death ; or, rather, birth, sexuality and death are the same, circular event. To be born into nature is to become both sexual and mortal.

In one sense, the Wall of Death image supersedes other versions of what the poem means. The poet whose images began with the first signs of life in the deepest Ocean is taking the journey from that beginning and never really escapes from the Wall of Death: the poet’s ride is as desperate at the end as it was at the start:

Man was Cadaver’s masker, the harnessing mantle, Windily master of man was the rotten fathom, My ghost in his metal neptune Forged in man’s mineral. This was the god of beginning in the intricate seawhirl, And my images roared‘and rose on heaven’s hill. (Part III, lines 31-36)

Any hope must be found in the roaring and rising which has Occupied the ghost in metal all through the poem. It is little wonder that Tindall, expecting a triumphant emergence from the intricacy of the poem, found the ending ‘a little abrupt.’ The Wall of Death is also heaven’s hill; from this Calvary any possibility of Resurrection is seen very dimly indeed. But the questions posed

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by Thomas in t h i s poem - questions both( metaphysical and poetic - were to perplex him throughout his life.

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Richard Church, letter to Dylan Thomas, November 26th, 1935, quoted in Con- stantine Fitzgibbon, The Life of e l a n Thomos, Dent, London, 1965, p. 196. Richard Church, ibid, p. 197. Dylan Thomas, letter to Richard Church, 9th December, 1935, in Selected Letters of Dykzn Thomas, edited by Constantine Fitzgibbon, Dent, London, 1966, p. 161. Dylan Thomas, review of Lyle hnaghy, Into the Light and Other Poems, The Adelphi, vol. 9, No. 5, February, 1935, p. 312. H. L. R. Edwards, ‘The Allusicmist School of Poetry: A Footnate’, Wales, No. 2, August, 1937, p. 45. According to Otto Hahn in Andrb Masson,, Thames and Hudson, London, 1965, Masson’s reconciliation with Breton in 1936 led to a second surrealist phase: Masson returned to France in 1937:

It was at this point that the labyrinth made its entry into Masson’s universe, along with its cortege of myths and symbols. A drawing of the period shows a Minotaur in a labyrinth; Ariadne’s thread twists and tangles like a long loop of bowel that will

David Gascoyne, A Short Survey of Suwealikm, Cobden-Sandemn, London, 1935, p. 126. See Sir Roland Penrose, picasso: His Life and Work, Gollancz, London, 1958, rev. ed., Penguin Books, 1971: ‘Beauty Must be Convulsive’ (ch. 8), pp. 234-270. Also see ‘The Homed God’, ibid, pp. 282-5. In his pencil drawing End of A Monster (193‘7) the Minotaur dies as a girl rising from the sea shows him his own image in ainirror; the ‘mirror’ has, inevitably, the same multiplicities of meaning as the object held by the Minotaur in the frontcover collage for Minotaure of 1933. Ralph m u d , Entrames to Dylan Thomas’s Poetry, University of Pittsburgh Press,

Dylan Thomas, letter to Charles Fisher, Febiuary, 1935, in Selected Letters of e l a s Thomas, p. 151. Lita Homick, The Intricate Image: A .Stdjv of Dylan Thomas, Unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, University of Columbia, U.S.A., 1958. (Disserlation Abstracts, XIX,

William York Tmdall, A Reuder’s Guide 1’0 Dykzn Thomas, Thames & Hudson, London, 1962, p.89. Clark Emery, The World of Dylan Thomas, University of Miami Press, U.S.A., 1962, Dent, London, 1972, p. 313. David Holbrook, ‘Metaphor and Maturity: lr. F. Powys and Dylan Thomas’, Pelican Guide to English Literature, edited by Boris :Ford, Part 7, (The Modem Age), 1961, p. 416. Paul C. Ray, The Surrealist Movement jn England, Cornell University Press,

end by Strangling US all. @p. 14-16)

U.S.A., 1963, Scorpion Press, Lowestoft, 1963, pp. 17-55.

NO. 2, pp 327-328).

U.S.A., 1971, pp. 281-2.