All language subtitles for Dylan Thomas (1 of 3) ENG.03

Death wouldn't bother him

after the first death he said,
there is no other

pity the living who are at last, alone

the dead in Hades have their host of friends

well wherever he is

somehow it can't be Hades

you can bet that Dylan has his host of friends

standing among them

brave and bold

talking

with the best

occupying the only true position,
as he said once

for an artist anywhere:

upright.

I was born, he wrote, in a large industrial
Welsh town at the beginning of the Great War

An ugly lovely, or so it seemed to me, town,

Crawling, sprawling, slummed, unplanned,
jerry-villa'd and smug-suburbed
by the side of a long and splendid-curving shore.

never was there such a town I thought
for the smell of fish and chips on Saturday nights

for the crowds in the streets

for the singing that gushed from the smoky doorways
of the pubs in the quarters we never should have visited

there was another world where with my friends
I used to dawdle on half-holidays
along the bent and Devon facing seashore

hoping for gold watches or the skull of a sheep
or a message in a bottle to be washed up with the tide

One afternoon in a particularly bright and
glowing August some years before I knew I was happy

we set out together to walk to the Worm's Head

we reached the spreading heathered common

down there is Oxwich

the ash-white of the road,
the green and blue of fields and fragmentary sea

laughing to each other on the cliff above a very long golden beach
we pointed out to each other the great rock of the Worm's Head

tomorrow we would bathe and throw a ball on the sands
and stone a bottle on a rock

and perhaps meet three girls

to walk and shout by the sea in the country,
throw stones at the waves, remember adventures
and make more to remember

we crossed over on slipping stones
and stood, at last, triumphantly on the windy top

there was monstrous thick grass
and we laughed and bounced on it

at the end of the humped and serpentine body
more gulls than I'd ever seen before
cried over their new dead and the droppings of ages

this isn't like any other place, I said

I watched the sea slipping out with birds quarreling over it

and the sun beginning to go down

patiently

oh yes yes I knew him well

he used to climb the reservoir railings

and pelt the old swans

run like a billy goat over the grass you should keep off of

cut branches of the trees

carve words on the benches

pull up moss in the rockery

or slip through the dahlias

fight in the bandstand

climb the elms

light fires in the bushes

oh yes I knew him well

I've known him by the thousand."

and that Park grew up with me

a bit of bush and flowerbed and lawn
in a snug, smug, trim, middling-prosperous suburb.

I discovered new refuges and ambushes
in its miniature woods and jungles

we knew every inhabitant of the park,
every regular visitor, every nursemaid
every gardener, every old man

we knew the hour when the alarming retired policeman
came in to look at the dahlias

and the hour when the old lady arrived
in a bath chair with six Pekinese and a pale girl to read aloud to her

I think she read the newspapers

but we always said she read the Wizard

the face of the old man who sat summer and winter
on the bench looking over the reservoir

I can see him clearly now

he saw them clearly till he died

this seaside town was his world

the lady and the policeman and the old man

all the shadows from childhood past have gone.

Or have they?

the chrysanthemums and the daisies
are there, different

- or the same?

who knows what strange dreams and coloured visions
still abound in Cwmdonkin Park for those who

alone

have the gift of sight?

it was Dylan's wonder that he kept until the end
the intense a vision of a child

and when he died

maybe it was that the child within had begun to cry
because there were no more secrets

On Swansea Town and the splendid curving shore
he drew his threads together

and from them wove his boyish dreams

and I came to the shops and houses of the uplands

here

and around here it was that that journey had begun
of the one I was pursuing through his past

to 5 Cwmdonkin Drive

where on the 27th of October 1914

he was born

here in a warm safe island of his bed
with sleepy midnight Swansea
flowing rolling round outside the house

he dreamt his dreams of bible black and dark green seas
from which

in the end he wrote his poems

written for the love of man and in praise of God

and I'd be a damned fool if they weren't

in the still room
the future spread out beyond the window

over the park crowded with lovers
messing about

and into smoky London

paved with coins

There was a young fella from Wales
who came up here telling his tales?

he says, don't get shirty cause some of 'em's dirty.
Yer learn 'em in all the best jails!

London

and all too soon he was the centre of literary activity

which means when you were young,
the right pubs

and later, the right flats

and later still, the right clubs

A young man who rollicked and rumpused and shocked

who believed that

music halls songs can be good poetry

it is hoped that in the future
when the battle-flag is furled

that men and women get together...

The young man knew all too well
the possible results and financial rewards

of poetry writing

writing limericks

vast market

little or no pay

poems in crackers

too seasonal

poems for children

this will kill you and the children

poems

on lavatory walls?

The reward is purely

psychological

he looked, someone once said,
like an unmade bed