Dylan Thomas, known for his masterful use of language, said of his own poetry that each poem is “a formally watertight compartment of words” and each “a rhythmic, inevitable narrative.”  He viewed  his writing process as dialectal, springing from an image and in a constant building up and tearing down of the one falling in upon or emerging from the other. Thomas, known for his use of use of duality emerging from Christian precepts of death-in-life and life-in-death, saw his poetry as a praise of God. 

AND DEATH SHALL HAVE 
NO DOMINION

And death shall have no dominion.
Dead men naked they shall be one
With the man in the wind and the west moon:
When their bones are picked clean and the clean bones gone,
They shall have stars at elbow and foot;
Though they go mad they shall be sane,
Though they sink through the sea they shall rise again;
Though lovers be lost love shall not;
And death shall have no dominion.

And death shall have no dominion.
Under the windings of the sea
They lying long shall not die windily;
Twisting on racks when sinews give way,
Strapped to a wheel, yet they shall not break;
Faith in their hands shall snap in two,
And the unicorn evils run them through;
Split all ends up they shan’t crack;
And death shall have no dominion.

And death shall have no dominion.
No more may gulls cry at their ears
Or waves break loud on the seashores;
Where blew a flower may a flower no more
Lift its head to the blows of the rain;
Though they be mad and dead as nails,
Heads of the characters hammer through daisies;
Break in the sun till the sun breaks down,
And death shall have no dominion. 

Critics attacked his method as a camouflage of thin themes under big words and rhythm.  He defended, “ I am a painstaking, conscientious, involved, and devious craftsman of words, however unsuccessful the result so often appears, and to whatever wrong uses I may apply my technical paraphernalia.”  He employed any device to make a poem work ranging from pun and slang to paradox and allusion to manipulations of assonance, consonance and sprung rhythms.  Of this method he said: “Poets have got to enjoy themselves sometimes, and the twistings and convolutions of words, the inventions and contrivances, are all part of the joy that is part of the painful, voluntary work.”  

 

IN MY CRAFT 
OR SULLEN ART

In my craft or sullen art
Exercised in the still night
When only the moon rages
And the lovers lie abed
With all their griefs in their arms,
I labour by singing light
Not for ambition or bread
Or the strut and trade of charms
On the ivory stages
But for the common wages
Of their most secret heart.

Not for the proud man apart
From the raging moon I write 
On these spindrift pages
Nor for the towering dead
With their nightingales and psalms
But for the lovers, their arms
Round the griefs of the ages,
Who pay no praise or wages
Nor heed my craft or art.

Dylan Thomas described his body of work simply. “My poetry is, or should be, useful to me for one reason: it is the record of my individual struggle from darkness towards some measure of light.” Dylan Thomas wrote this disciplined villanelle for his father (who died a year before Dylan did) as his father was dying.  

 

DO NOT GO GENTLE 
INTO THAT GOOD NIGHT

Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Though wise men at their end know dark is right,
Because their words had forked no lightning they
Do not go gentle into that good night.

Good men, the last wave by, crying how bright
Their frail deeds might have danced in a green bay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Wild men who caught and sang the sun in flight,
And learn, too late, they grieved it on its way,
Do not go gentle into that good night.

Grave men, near death who see with blinding sight
Blind eyes could blaze like meteors and be gay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

And you, my father, there on the sad height,
Curse, bless, me now with your fierce tears, I pray.
Do not go gentle into that good night.
Rage, rage against the dying of the light. 

Dylan Thomas was born in Swansea, Wales in 1914.   He refused to attend the universities and was largely self-taught as a poet. His first books of poems,  18 Poems, was published when he was twenty.   Collected Poems, his final volume, was published in 1949.  Alcoholism helped usher him to his death a few days after his 39th birthday in New York City during a  lecture tour of the United States in 1953.

from Vision and Prayer (1)

Who
Are you
Who is born
In the next room
So  loud  to  my  own
That I can hear the womb
Opening  and  the  dark run
Over the ghost and the dropped son
Behind the wall thin as a wren’s bone?
In the birth bloody  room unknown
To the burn and turn of time
And the heart print of man
Bows   no   baptism
But   dark  alone
Blessing on
The wild
Child.

The source for facts citedis The Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry, 2nd
Edition.
Suggested further reading:  The Poems of Dylan Thomas, ed. David Jones,
New York, 1971. (Jones was a lifelong friend of Thomas’s.)