Arthur Rimbaud, notorious poète maudit of Charleville abandoned poetry in his nineteeth year, in 1874. Dylan Thomas, self-styled “Rimbaud of Cwmdonkin Drive,” about a mile from the Swansea seafront in South Wales, was in his nineteenth year when he wrote “The Force that through the green fuse drives the flower” in 1933. Rimbaud’s demand that the poet become a seer through a process of degradation—a psychic, alchemical breakdown—was expressed in two letters, his lettres du voyant, the first to Georges Izambard on May 13th, 1871, the second to Paul Demeny two days later:
I say one must be a seer, make oneself a seer. The Poet makes himself a seer by a long, gigantic, and rational derangement of all the senses. All forms of love, suffering, and madness. He searches himself. He exhausts all poisons in himself and keeps only their quintessence.1 (377).
Rimbaud made hermetic gestures with language, what he would call “The Alchemy of the Word” in A Season in Hell (1873). This, he developed from “Voyelles” (Vowels), a poem composed some time between 1870-72. The vowels, Rimbaud’s poems explain are alchemical elements “A black, E white, I red, U green, O blue” with
U, cycles, divine vibrations of green seas,
Peace of pastures scattered with animals, peace of the wrinkles
Which alchemy prints on heavy studious brows;”.2
And Thomas used or fused that same green U with its “cycles, divine vibrations of green seas” in “The force the through the green fuse…” He perceived also (and not without irony) that “God moves in a long ‘o’,” —a numinous zero perhaps. As Rimbaud put it in “Voyelles,”
O, Supreme Clarion full of strange stridor,
Silences crossed by Worlds and Angels:
—O, the Omega, violet beam from His Eyes!
The long open vowel is also the openness of the abyss then, the sickness (strange stridor) in the breath of life. For Rimbaud, the alchemical vowel I was for “purples, spit blood, laughter of beautiful lips / In anger or penitent drunkeness;” and there is much penitent drunkeness in Thomas’ I and drive. A and E are also of the regrets of birth, sex, and death in Rimbaud, black and white respectively
One day I will tell your latent birth:
A, black hairy corset of shining flies
Which buzz around cruel stench.
Gulfs of darkness; E, whiteness of vapors and tents
Lances of proud glaciers, white kings, quivering of flowers;3
All of this, one finds in Dylan Thomas, also—births, eroticized death, black, white, flies, darkness, and the quivering of flowers, throughout his body of poetry. The issue is not how intimate and studied Thomas’ alignment with Rimbaud was, but the unconscious dynamics once that conscious identification is made. In “Delirium II: Alchemy of the Word,” Rimbaud writes:
I invented the colors of the vowels! — A black, E white, I red, O blue, U green. — I regulated the form and movement of each consonant, and, with instinctive rhythms, I prided myself on inventing a poetic language accessible, some day, to all the senses. I reserved translation rights.4
Accessible, that is, to all the senses in their rational derangement. Dylan Thomas and Rimbaud had several things in common, not least their derangements by, and distillations of poisons literal and metaphorical. But also there is the sense one receives from the poems that Rimbaud and Thomas are unbelievers who must write as if they believed, whose art rests on the unorthodox visionary archetypes of Blake and Milton, as well as a furtive background orthodoxy. Great literature demands this even of its agnostic practitioners and even its atheists, to engage the numinous wherever it can be located.
Behind the booze and boasting of the Dylan Thomas legend, one finds what William Empson referred to as Thomas’ “pessimistic pantheism,”5 Andrew Lycett calls it his “autochthonous sense of religion, an elemental force.”6 Both toiled in what Rimbaud called the “Bad Blood” of their Gallic and Gaelic ancestry, inheriting “idolatry and love of sacrilege,—oh! All vices: anger, lust—lust that is grandiose—and especially deceit and sloth”.7 These also drew Dylan Thomas to Henry Miller who believed that the Rimbaud-type was ascendant in the 20th century, and to D. H. Lawrence whose ambivalent or functional psychology, sense of Christ, and the apocalyptic life force are intimately bound in Thomas. They run, in a limited but not imaginary sense, parallel to Wilhelm Reich.
But Thomas’ hermetic use of Rimbaud’s alchemical language also brings him, unconsciously, close to Jung. Thomas’ language is alchemical and archetypal in a way that no poet has been since, including, say, Ted Hughes, whose occult and shamanic tendencies were more deliberately aimed at toward the paranormal. Thomas was not an occultist in that sense. Thomas had his superstitions, but these were invocations of folk archetypes. Tarot and astrology appear in his work linguistically, as formations in the psyche, but not as the practice of the poet, as they were for Hughes.
To return to Jung, in Thomas’ poetry, words are not only ‘complex’ in the normal poetic sense of connotation and allusion, but they have the force of ‘complexes’ in the Jungian sense of archetypes. From Thomas’ most forceful poems emerge what analysts might regard as quaternary gnostic images, or some might compare with mandalas. Dylan Thomas works with the alchemical substance of his language, returning often to certain words, inexhaustible even in their apparent simplicity. Thomas’ greens, blacks, moons, tides, seas, darks, wombs, ages, even his Christ, all of these and other recurring images in his poems are gnostic, possessing the full force and range of the unconscious. All are deeper than the common poet’s pun. This, I maintain, is part of why Thomas’ language has an intuitive appeal in its emerging sonorities, the assonance and precise repetition in his lines, their rhythms and synchronicities. And yes, he returns to the alchemical properties of vowels, colors, elements, and seasons. “The force that through the green fuse drives the flower” is a case in point.
Constantine Fitzgibbon notes the intensity of Thomas’ youthful sexual frustration, the solace and vice of masturbation that he engaged in “all his life and to excess.”8 Andrew Lycett notes something similar, and that, of course masturbation is overt in the poem “My hero bares his nerves” which follows the act to a final flush of the toilet. Later, Thomas’ affairs and sexual indulgence would determine much of his myth as a dangerous poet. In “The force that through the green fuse…” Thomas identifies all the drives of sex and death in functional alignment in his flesh and in apparently exterior nature, fusing them in his several senses.
This is a poem about the automatism of fertility, the compulsions of sexuality and natural energies. Reaching into Blake’s transgressive “The Sick Rose,” it’s an intensely genital and oral poem, phallic, vaginal, open-mouthed, fusing the up-rushing force of chlorophyll in the flower with the flow of blood into erectile tissue, but that “lust that is grandiose” in Rimbaud is shadowed by death in both he and Thomas. The same drive, whether Freud’s libidinal economy, or the functional unity of nature in Reich’s orgasm reflex or formula or tension and relaxation acts upon all nature, and there is no question of willing it or not. It is a poem of nature naturing, and in that sense what guilt or dread hangs over human sexuality cannot be explained back into nature; one is rendered mute or idiotic in explanation. It is a poem influenced by Lawrence’s sense of apocalyptic life force, of fluids, ejaculatory and menstrual, haunted and fused, driven by an intuitive archetypal and libidinal psychology. Empson’s description of Thomas’ “pessimistic pantheism” is most apt. And here is Rimbaud’s alchemy of the word, is fused in another young man, Dylan Thomas as the Rimbaud of Cwmdonkin Drive, with an uncanny sense of his world.
The force that through the green fuse drives the flower
Drives my green age; that blasts the roots of trees
Is my destroyer.
And I am dumb to tell the crooked rose
My youth is bent by the same wintry fever.
The force that drives the water through the rocks
Drives my red blood; that dries the mouthing streams
Turns mine to wax.
And I am dumb to mouth unto my veins
How at the mountain spring the same mouth sucks.
The hand that whirls the water in the pool
Stirs the quicksand; that ropes the blowing wind
Hauls my shroud sail.
And I am dumb to tell the hanging man
How of my clay is made the hangman's lime.
The lips of time leech to the fountain head;
Love drips and gathers, but the fallen blood
Shall calm her sores.
And I am dumb to tell a weather's wind
How time has ticked a heaven round the stars.
And I am dumb to tell the lover's tomb
How at my sheet goes the same crooked worm.
Thank you for reading, and I hope this gives you some ideas.
Regards from New Mexico,
—James Reich
Rimbaud, A. (2005) Rimbaud: Complete Works, Selected Letters. Wallace Fowlie (trans.). Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, p. 377
ibid. p. 141
ibid.
ibid. p. 285
Fitzgibbon, C. (1965) The Life of Dylan Thomas. London, UK: Dent, p. 260
Lycett, A. (2003) Dylan Thomas: A New Life. Woodstock, NY: Overlook Press, p. 120
Rimbaud, p. 265
Fitzgibbon, p. 123