Elegy

[Gob]

Unfinished Dylan Thomas poem 'saved for Wales'

Dylan Thomas's last unfinished poem has been given a permanent home at the National Library of Wales after being bought from a collector.

Elegy was bought as part of a collection of Thomas's work.

It was written during his time in America, just a few years before his death in 1953.

The National Librarian Andrew Green said: "This collection of work gives us an insight into how Dylan Thomas worked as a poet."

The manuscript for Elegy is said to be a "very early draft".

The collection also includes an extensive word-list for Poem on His Birthday, first published in World Review in 1951, and some of his very early poems, such as A Refusal to Mourn the Death by Fire of a Child in London.

This collections adds to the archive of work by Dylan Thomas held by the library in Aberystwyth, which includes a unique map drawn by Thomas of his fictional village, Llareggub, for the world-famous radio play, Under Milk Wood.

The collection was bought from Jeff Towns, who owns Dylan's bookshop in Swansea.

Nia Daniel, head of the library's manuscripts and visual images unit, said the collection could help change perceptions of Dylan Thomas.

She said: "Maybe people have the idea of Dylan Thomas as drunk and erratic, but if you look at the manuscripts for his poems it shows how careful he was in putting his poems together."

She added: "The collection reveals the effort Dylan Thomas put into his poetry; lists and lists of rhyming words for poems and alliterations."

It was "the kind of thing you see less and less as people write on a computer and not on paper", she said.

Mr Green said the National Library of Wales took its role as the nation's principal archive very seriously.

He said: "In a long line of poets stretching over 1,500 years in Welsh and then English, Dylan Thomas is one of the best known of Welsh poets.

"This is a very welcome addition to the library's archive and it also means that the work of one of Wales' best known poet stays in his native land."

Ms Daniel added: "It's very important for Wales. When Thomas died a lot of his manuscripts were bought up by large American libraries.

"But over the last 20 years we have amassed a collection we would say is the equal of those collections."

Elegy


Too proud to die; broken and blind he died
The darkest way, and did not turn away,
A cold kind man brave in his narrow pride

On that darkest day, Oh, forever may
He lie lightly, at last, on the last, crossed
Hill, under the grass, in love, and there grow

Young among the long flocks, and never lie lost
Or still all the numberless days of his death, though
Above all he longed for his mother's breast

Which was rest and dust, and in the kind ground
The darkest justice of death, blind and unblessed.
Let him find no rest but be fathered and found,

I prayed in the crouching room, by his blind bed,
In the muted house, one minute before
Noon, and night, and light. the rivers of the dead

Veined his poor hand I held, and I saw
Through his unseeing eyes to the roots of the sea.
(An old tormented man three-quarters blind,

I am not too proud to cry that He and he
Will never never go out of my mind.
All his bones crying, and poor in all but pain,

Being innocent, he dreaded that he died
Hating his God, but what he was was plain:
An old kind man brave in his burning pride.

The sticks of the house were his; his books he owned.
Even as a baby he had never cried;
Nor did he now, save to his secret wound.

Out of his eyes I saw the last light glide.
Here among the liught of the lording sky
An old man is with me where I go

Walking in the meadows of his son's eye
On whom a world of ills came down like snow.
He cried as he died, fearing at last the spheres'

Last sound, the world going out without a breath:
Too proud to cry, too frail to check the tears,
And caught between two nights, blindness and death.

O deepest wound of all that he should die
On that darkest day. oh, he could hide
The tears out of his eyes, too proud to cry.

Until I die he will not leave my side.)

Dylan Thomas

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-wales-mid-wales-10689862