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Deaths and Entrances
. J M Dent, 1946 1st, clean copy light toning to edges, small mark to cover, no dustjacket, Professional booksellers since 1981
68 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 1946
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About the author
Dylan Thomas
542 books1,374 followersDylan Marlais Thomas (1914-1953) was a Welsh poet who wrote in English. Many regard him as one of the 20th century's most influential poets.
In addition to poetry, Thomas wrote short stories and scripts for film and radio, with the latter frequently performed by Thomas himself. His public readings, particularly in America, won him great acclaim; his booming, at times, ostentatious voice, with a subtle Welsh lilt, became almost as famous as his works. His best-known work includes the "play for voices" Under Milk Wood and the celebrated villanelle for his dying father, "Do not go gentle into that good night." Appreciative critics have also noted the superb craftsmanship and compression of poems such as "In my craft or sullen art" and the rhapsodic lyricism of Fern Hill.
In addition to poetry, Thomas wrote short stories and scripts for film and radio, with the latter frequently performed by Thomas himself. His public readings, particularly in America, won him great acclaim; his booming, at times, ostentatious voice, with a subtle Welsh lilt, became almost as famous as his works. His best-known work includes the "play for voices" Under Milk Wood and the celebrated villanelle for his dying father, "Do not go gentle into that good night." Appreciative critics have also noted the superb craftsmanship and compression of poems such as "In my craft or sullen art" and the rhapsodic lyricism of Fern Hill.
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Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews
May 24, 2020
Probably the poetry collection i would recommend anyone that wanted to read thomas, some of his best stuff. Highlights ~ "The Conversation of Prayer" "Poem in October" "This Side Of The Truth" "To Others Than You" "Ceremony After a Fire Raid" "When I woke" "Among Those Killed In The Dawn Raid Was A Man Aged A Hundred" and "Fern Hill".
July 24, 2022
Now as I was young and easy under the apple boughs
About the lilting house and happy as the grass was green,
The night above the dingle starry,
Time let me hail and climb
Golden in the heydays of his eyes,
And honoured among wagons I was prince of the apple towns
And once below a time I lordly had the trees and leaves
Trail with daisies and barley
Down the rivers of the windfall light….
A good number of the poems in the volume entitled ‘Death and Entrances’, published in 1946, were written during 1939-45 in his tranquil and silent bungalow at New Quay, a sea-side town in Wales.
Dylan had by now bushed the material in the four Swansea Notebooks, and they had been sold out. The poems of this volume, consequently, are the work of the established Dylan, and some of them are among his most excellent lyrics.
Among them are his two masterpieces, “Fern Hill’ and ‘In My Craft or Sullen Art’.
The conclusion of the war and Dylan’s return to Wales brought about the satisfied soaring of his brilliance as a poet.
These poems set the seal of critical approval on Dylan’s reputations they show how Dylan’s hackwork on film-scripts and reviews and occasional prose pieces for broadcasting had wonderfully improved the clarity of his poems.
The equilibrium and effortlessness and sensuousness of ‘Poem In October’ and ‘Fern Hill’ were the true labours of a man who had grown out of the wilful obscurities of youth into the cautious simplicities of age.
Consider these lines from ‘Poem in October’, where the narrator reminisces his expedition out of autumn and up a hill to retrieve the delight of his boyhood years, the summer season, and the spark of mysticism:
It was my thirtieth year to heaven
Woke to my hearing from harbour and neighbour wood
And the mussel pooled and the heron priested shore
The morning beckoned with water praying and call of seagull and rook
And the knock of sailing boats on the net-webbed wall
Myself to set foot that second
In the still sleeping town and set forth
My birthday began with the water birds
And the birds of the winged trees flying my name
Above the farms and the white horses
And I rose in a rainy autumn
And walked abroad in shower of all my days
High tide and the heron dived
When I took the road over the border
And the gates of the town closed as the town awoke
A springful of larks in a rolling cloud
And the roadside bushes brimming with whistling blackbirds
And the sun of October, summery on the hill's shoulder
Here were fond climates and sweet singers suddenly come in the morning
Where I wandered and listened to the rain wringing wind blow cold
In the wood faraway under me………
It is unimaginable that the immature and adolescent Dylan would have dared to be as undeviating and idealistic as the full-grown poet in his meditation of his work, as he is in the poems of this volume.
About the lilting house and happy as the grass was green,
The night above the dingle starry,
Time let me hail and climb
Golden in the heydays of his eyes,
And honoured among wagons I was prince of the apple towns
And once below a time I lordly had the trees and leaves
Trail with daisies and barley
Down the rivers of the windfall light….
A good number of the poems in the volume entitled ‘Death and Entrances’, published in 1946, were written during 1939-45 in his tranquil and silent bungalow at New Quay, a sea-side town in Wales.
Dylan had by now bushed the material in the four Swansea Notebooks, and they had been sold out. The poems of this volume, consequently, are the work of the established Dylan, and some of them are among his most excellent lyrics.
Among them are his two masterpieces, “Fern Hill’ and ‘In My Craft or Sullen Art’.
The conclusion of the war and Dylan’s return to Wales brought about the satisfied soaring of his brilliance as a poet.
These poems set the seal of critical approval on Dylan’s reputations they show how Dylan’s hackwork on film-scripts and reviews and occasional prose pieces for broadcasting had wonderfully improved the clarity of his poems.
The equilibrium and effortlessness and sensuousness of ‘Poem In October’ and ‘Fern Hill’ were the true labours of a man who had grown out of the wilful obscurities of youth into the cautious simplicities of age.
Consider these lines from ‘Poem in October’, where the narrator reminisces his expedition out of autumn and up a hill to retrieve the delight of his boyhood years, the summer season, and the spark of mysticism:
It was my thirtieth year to heaven
Woke to my hearing from harbour and neighbour wood
And the mussel pooled and the heron priested shore
The morning beckoned with water praying and call of seagull and rook
And the knock of sailing boats on the net-webbed wall
Myself to set foot that second
In the still sleeping town and set forth
My birthday began with the water birds
And the birds of the winged trees flying my name
Above the farms and the white horses
And I rose in a rainy autumn
And walked abroad in shower of all my days
High tide and the heron dived
When I took the road over the border
And the gates of the town closed as the town awoke
A springful of larks in a rolling cloud
And the roadside bushes brimming with whistling blackbirds
And the sun of October, summery on the hill's shoulder
Here were fond climates and sweet singers suddenly come in the morning
Where I wandered and listened to the rain wringing wind blow cold
In the wood faraway under me………
It is unimaginable that the immature and adolescent Dylan would have dared to be as undeviating and idealistic as the full-grown poet in his meditation of his work, as he is in the poems of this volume.
October 31, 2019
For me these poems are gateways into a kind of jumbling up of yourself with ancient things. Listening to Dylan himself reading the poems is also brilliant.
“Endure the stone
Blind host to sleep
In the dark
And deep
Rock
Awake”
“He sped into the drinking dark;
The sun shipwrecked west on a pearl
And the moon swam out of its hulk.”
“I climb to greet the war in which I have no heart but only
That one dark I owe my light...
And I am struck as lonely as a holy maker by the sun.”
“Endure the stone
Blind host to sleep
In the dark
And deep
Rock
Awake”
“He sped into the drinking dark;
The sun shipwrecked west on a pearl
And the moon swam out of its hulk.”
“I climb to greet the war in which I have no heart but only
That one dark I owe my light...
And I am struck as lonely as a holy maker by the sun.”
January 6, 2024
"The centuries throw back their hair
And the old men sing from newborn lips:
Time is bearing another son.
Kill Time! She turns in her pain!
The oak is felled in the acorn
And the hawk in the egg kills the wren."
And the old men sing from newborn lips:
Time is bearing another son.
Kill Time! She turns in her pain!
The oak is felled in the acorn
And the hawk in the egg kills the wren."
July 11, 2022
7,5/10
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September 17, 2022a lot of Dylan’s biggest hits with a few special little pieces which one doesn’t often see outside of it AND the ridiculous Herbertian Visions. All part of my devious scheme to acclimatise to him
Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews
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