About Dylan Thomas

BACKGROUND TO THE POEM
Dylan Thomas’s poem deals with the endless cycle of life and death in a series of immensely rich and vivid images that examine nature, mortality, love and what it means to be alive. There is a restless muscularity about much of the poem as soon as the sense of an unstoppable, powerful force is introduced in line one. It ‘blasts’ the roots of trees and is the speaker’s ‘destroyer’.

What connections does Thomas see between nature and man in the first two verses, and what is the impact of the repeated use of ‘drives’? Note how the sense of regular, repeated processes in nature is reinforced by the use of repetition in the poem. The four main verses begin with ‘The’ and the final lines of verses two, three and four begin with ‘How’, whilethe fourth lines begin with ‘And’. The third line in each verse is shortened.

What images of an explosive force and energy that can be destructive as well as creative do you see in the poem? What do you think is the significance of the ‘crooked worm’ in the final line?

ABOUT DYLAN THOMAS
Dylan Thomas was a Welsh poet born in Swansea who wrote only in English. His highly acclaimed first collection, 18 Poems, appeared when he was just twenty, in 1934. In an age of stripped‑down modernism, his passionate, vivid, lyrical work made a significant impression in literary circles in Wales and England. Subsequent collections contained poems that remain extremely well known today, such as ‘Fern Hill’, ‘And Death Shall Have No Dominion’ and ‘Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night’.

In 1937 Thomas married Caitlin Macnamara and began a relationship that was consistently tempestuous and marked by passion, drunkenness and infidelities until Thomas’s death in 1953, when he was on a performance tour of America. As an unpredictable but mesmerizing performer of his own work, Thomas made many broadcasts for the radio, and one of his most famous works is the radio play Under Milk Wood.

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