Waxing Poetic: Love in the Asylum by Dylan Thomas

     Dylan Thomas (1914-1953) was a Welsh poet, short story, and script writer.  His first book of poetry was published when he was not yet 20 years old.  Although he was born just as the modern age of literary culture was beginning, Thomas wrote poetry which often used traditional forms of rhythm, rhyme, and meter.
     Thomas once confided that the poems which had most influenced him were Mother Goose rhymes which his parents taught him when he was a child. 

I should say I wanted to write poetry in the beginning because I had fallen in love with words. The first poems I knew were nursery rhymes and before I could read them for myself I had come to love the words of them. The words alone. What the words stood for was of a very secondary importance. [...] I fell in love, that is the only expression I can think of, at once, and am still at the mercy of words, though sometimes now, knowing a little of their behavior very well, I think I can influence them slightly and have even learned to beat them now and then, which they appear to enjoy. I tumbled for words at once. And, when I began to read the nursery rhymes for myself, and, later, to read other verses and ballads, I knew that I had discovered the most important things, to me, that could be ever.

     He began his literary career in London, but in 1938 he moved back to Wales where he spent most of the remainder of his life.  His home was in the small seaside village of Laugharne on the river Towy.  His house, called the Boat House, was located right on the estuary of the Towy.  He used the potting shed to write his poetry.

     His marriage to Caitlin Macnamara, who was a dancer in a London pub when he met her, was a turbulent one.  He had a serious problem with alcohol and Caitlin wrote two autobiographies after Thomas's death in which she describes the destructive effect of alcohol on both Thomas and herself and their relationship.  Some say that the following poem is based on Caitlin.

Love in the Asylum

A stranger has come
To share my room in the house not right in the head,
A girl mad as birds

Bolting the night of the door with her arm her plume.
Strait in the mazed bed
She deludes the heaven-proof house with entering clouds

Yet she deludes with walking the nightmarish room,
At large as the dead,
Or rides the imagined oceans of the male wards.

She has come possessed
Who admits the delusive light through the bouncing wall,
Possessed by the skies

She sleeps in the narrow trough yet she walks the dust
Yet raves at her will
On the madhouse boards worn thin by my walking tears.

And taken by light in her arms at long and dear last
I may without fail
Suffer the first vision that set fire to the stars.

     Thomas made many public readings of his works.  His sonorous voice with a subtle Welsh lilt became almost as famous as his works.  Here's a link to an recording of Thomas reading Love in the Asylum.