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However, the chief reason of Thomas’ fame as a
poet lies in the strange violence of his imageries, which stem from his
rebellious view to death and life. To Thomas, the universe is forever in the
cycle from life to death and then to rebirth. Life itself leads to death
while death is also the cradle of life. In the poem, “Fern Hill”:
And
then to awake, and the farm, like a wanderer white
With
the dew, come back, the cock on his shoulder: it was all
Shining, it was Adam and maiden,
The sky gathered again
And the sun grew round that very day.
So it
must have been after the birth of the simple light
In the
first, spinning place, the spellbound horses walking warm
Out of the whinnying green stable
On to the fields of praise.
In Thomas’ poems, death and hell are as beautiful and
touching as life, sun and spring. In the poem, “The Force That Through the
Green Fuse”, he depicted nature as a mysterious power, which can both give
birth to everything and destroy all of them. The first two stanzas read:
The force that through the green fuse drive the flower
Drive my green age; that blasts the roots of trees
Is my destroyer.
And
The force that drives the water through the roots
Drives my red blood; that drives the mounting streams
Turns mine to wax.
This poem shows the poet’s skillfulness in using
polysemous words and eccentric images. In addition, the use of incomplete
rhyme, alliteration, internal rhymes and assonance also strengthen the theme
of the poem.
Another example is one of his best poems, “A
Refusal to Mourn the Death, by Fire, of a Child in London”. It looks like a
striking and confusing refusal, but the poet tries to justify it by
suggesting that life and death are the sides of one sail, thus he concluded
in the end of the poem:
After the first death, there is no other.
The most powerful and memorable poem of Thomas
may be the one written for the poet’s dying father, “Do Not Go Gentle into
That Good Night”.
Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
Rage, rage, against the dying of the light.
…
And you, my father, there on the sad height,
Curse, bless, me now with your fierce tears, I pray.
Do not go gentle into that good night.
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
In this poem, by discussing the attitudes of four kinds
of men, the poet has developed his rebellious spirit, his skill on the
bardic style and the rhyming techniques into their full strength.
As a neo-romantic poet in the twentieth century,
Thomas put a kind of modern consciousness into his poems. He expressed the
feelings of the whole mankind rather than the personal emotion concentrated
in poems of the 18th Romanticists.
Undoubtedly, Thomas differs from T. S. Eliot and the
Auden Group in theme and technique. Life, death and the forever circulation
between the two were the source of almost all Thomas’ poems. He often begins
the poem with human experiences or feelings and then explored their nature
and brought his lines into a higher state. The great contribution made to
the themes and techniques of English modern poetry in such a short life has
established Thomas as the most important and influential poet in English
literary history since 1940s.
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