THOMAS, Dylan


Notes On The Art Of Poetry


I could never have dreamt that there were such goings-on

in the world between the covers of books,

such sandstorms and ice blasts of words,

such staggering peace, such enormous laughter,

such and so many blinding bright lights,

splashing all over the pages

in a million bits and pieces

all of which were words, words, words,

and each of which were alive forever

in its own delight and glory and oddity and light.






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.



Ga, ga niet zacht, in die goede nacht


Ga, ga niet zacht, in die goede nacht,

Een oude dag moet branden en bulderen aan het eind;

Raas en tier tegen het doven van het licht.


Al weten wijze mannen aan hun eind dat donker wacht,

Omdat hun woorden geen vonken deden vlammen, zij

Gaan, gaan niet zacht, in die goede nacht.


Goede mannen, voorbij de laatste golfslag, die huilen hoe helder

Hun tere daden hadden kunnen dansen in een groen dal, zij

Razen en tieren tegen het doven van het licht.


Wilde mannen die de zon op de vlucht vingen en bezongen,

En te laat merken dat zij ze kneusden onderweg, zij

Gaan, gaan niet zacht, in die goede nacht.


Sombere mannen, de dood nabij, die met verblinde blik zien

Hoe blinde ogen als meteoren kunnen gloeien en schitteren, zij

Razen en tieren tegen het doven van het licht.


En gij, mijn vader, daar op de droeve hoogte,

Ik smeek u, beproef, zegen me nu met uw felle tranen.

Ga, ga niet zacht, in die goede nacht.

Raas en tier tegen het doven van het licht.


Dutch translation: Z. DE MEESTER



Ga niet gedwee de goede nacht in, uit het zicht.


Ga niet gedwee de goede nacht in, uit het zicht.

Oud moet juist branden, vlammen, aan het einde van de dag:

Verzet je, ga tekeer tegen het doven van het licht.


Ook een wijs man, als hij aan ’t eind, voor ’t donker zwicht,

Omdat hij van zijn woord geen bliksems komen zag,

Gaat niet gedwee de goede nacht in, uit het zicht.


Een goed mens, de laatste golf nabij, in tranen, want wellicht,

Hadden zijn broze daden kunnen dansen op groen gras,

Gaat toch tekeer tegen het doven van het licht.


De woesteling, die zon in zang ving en gedicht,

En te laat inzag dat hij hem bedroefde op zijn pad, ach

Ook hij gaat niet gedwee de goede nacht in, uit het zicht.


Ernstige mannen die, de dood nabij, met oogverblindend inzicht

Zien hoe blinde ogen als meteoren vlamden, met een lach,

Gaan toch tekeer tegen het doven van het licht.


En gij, mijn vader, die daar op de droeve hoogte ligt,

Vloek, zegen mij nu met uw heftige tranen, als het mag.

Ga niet gedwee die goede nacht in, uit het zicht,

Verzet je, ga tekeer tegen het doven van het licht


(Vertaling Harry KUITER



Geh nicht gelassen in die gute Nacht


Geh nicht gelassen in die gute Nacht,

Brenn, Alter, rase, wenn die Dämmerung lauert;

Im Sterbelicht sei doppelt zornentfacht.


Weil keinen Funken je ihr Wort erbracht,

Weise – gewiss, dass Dunkel rechtens dauert-,

Geh nicht gelassen in die gute Nacht.


Wer seines schwachen Tuns rühmt künftige Pracht

Im Sinken, hätt nur grünes Blühn gedauert,

Im Sterbelicht bist doppelt zornentfacht.


Wer jagt und preist der fliehenden Sonne Macht

Und lernt zu spät, dass er nur sie betrauert,

Geh nicht gelassen in die gute Nacht.


Wer todesnah erkennt im blinden Schacht,

Das Auge blind noch blitzt und froh erschauert,

Im Sterbelicht ist doppelt zornentfacht.


Und du mein Vater dort auf der Todeswacht,

Fluch segne mich, von Tränenwut vermauert.

Geh nicht gelassen in die gute Nacht.

Im Sterbelicht ist doppelt zornentfacht.


Übersetzung Curt Meyer-Clasons






Especially when the October wind


Especially when the October wind

With frosty fingers punishes my hair,

Caught by the crabbing sun I walk on fire

And cast a shadow crab upon the land,

By the sea's side, hearing the noise of birds,

Hearing the raven cough in winter sticks,

My busy heart who shudders as she talks

Sheds the syllabic blood and drains her words.


Shut, too, in a tower of words, I mark

On the horizon walking like the trees

The wordy shapes of women, and the rows

Of the star-gestured children in the park.

Some let me make you of the vowelled beeches,

Some of the oaken voices, from the roots

Of many a thorny shire tell you notes,

Some let me make you of the water's speeches.


Behind a pot of ferns the wagging clock

Tells me the hour's word, the neural meaning

Flies on the shafted disk, declaims the morning

And tells the windy weather in the cock.

Some let me make you of the meadow's signs;

The signal grass that tells me all I know

Breaks with the wormy winter through the eye.

Some let me tell you of the raven's sins.


Especially when the October wind

(Some let me make you of autumnal spells,

The spider-tongued, and the loud hill of Wales)

With fists of turnips punishes the land,

Some let me make you of the heartless words.

The heart is drained that, spelling in the scurry

Of chemic blood, warned of the coming fury.

By the sea's side hear the dark-vowelled birds.



When all my five and country senses see


When all my five and country senses see

The fingers will forget green thumbs and mark

How, through the halfmoon's vegetable eye,

Husk of young stars and handfull zodiac,

Love in the frost is pared and wintered by,

The whispering ears will watch love drummed away

Down breeze and shell to a discordant beach,

And, lashed to syllables, the lynx tongue cry

That her fond wounds are mended bitterly.

My nostrils see her breath burn like a bush.


My one and noble heart has witnesses

In all love's countries, that will grope awake;

And when blind sleep drops on the spying senses,

The heart is sensual, though five eyes break.




And death shall have no dominion


And death shall have no dominion.

Dead man 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.



Nee dood, ons krijg je er niet onder


Dode man en naakte man, zij zullen één zijn

met de man in de wind en de westermaan;

als hun knoken zijn schoongepikt en blanke botten vergaan,

zullen zij aan voet en elleboog sterren dragen;

al worden ze gek, ze zullen ze bij zinnen zijn,

al zinken ze door de zee, ze zullen weer opstaan;

Al gaan geliefden teloor, de liefde blijft;

nee dood, ons krijg je er niet onder.


Nee dood, ons krijg je er niet onder.

Onder de maalstromen van de zee

languit liggend zullen zij niet schielijk sterven;

kronkelend op pijnbanken als pezen begeven,

geklonken op een rad, zullen ze toch niet breken;

het geloof zal in hun handen in twee splijten

en de eenhoorn's toorn zal hen doorboren;

spiets alle uiteinden, kraken zullen ze niet;

nee dood, ons krijg je er niet onder.


Nee dood, ons krijg je er niet onder.

Geen meeuwen kunnen nog schreeuwen aan hun oren

of golven luid breken op zeekusten;

waar bloemen bloeiden kan geen bloem meer

de kop rechten naar striemende regen;

al zijn ze dan gek en dood als een pier,

beuken figuren hun koppen door madeliefjes;

bestorm de zon tot ze bezwijkt;

nee dood, ons krijg je er niet onder.


Dutch translation: Z. DE MEESTER





Fern Hill


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.


And as I was green and carefree, famous among the barns

About the happy yard and singing as the farm was home,

In the sun that is young once only,

Time let me play and be

Golden in the mercy of his means,

And green and golden I was huntsman and herdsman, the calves

Sang to my horn, the foxes on the hills barked clear and cold,

And the sabbath rang slowly

In the pebbles of the holy streams.


All the sun long it was running, it was lovely, the hay

Fields high as the house, the tunes from the chimneys, it was air

And playing, lovely and watery

And fire green as grass.

And nightly under the simple stars

As I rode to sleep the owls were bearing the farm away,

All the moon long I heard, blessed among stables, the nightjars

Flying with the ricks, and the horses

Flashing into the dark.


And then to awake, and the farm, like a wanderer white

With the dew, come back, the cock on his shoulder: it was all

Shining, it was Adam and maiden,

The sky gathered again

And the sun grew round that very day.

So it must have been after the birth of the simple light

In the first, spinning place, the spellbound horses walking warm

Out of the whinnying green stable

On to the fields of praise.


And honoured among foxes and pheasants by the gay house

Under the new made clouds and happy as the heart was long,

In the sun born over and over,

I ran my heedless ways,

My wishes raced through the house high hay

And nothing I cared, at my sky blue trades, that time allows

In all his tuneful turning so few and such morning songs

Before the children green and golden

Follow him out of grace,


Nothing I cared, in the lamb white days, that time would take me

Up to the swallow thronged loft by the shadow of my hand,

In the moon that is always rising,

Nor that riding to sleep

I should hear him fly with the high fields

And wake to the farm forever fled from the childless land.

Oh as I was young and easy in the mercy of his means,

Time held me green and dying

Though I sang in my chains like the sea.



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.



Our eunuch dreams


I

Our eunuch dreams, all seedless in the light,

Of light and love the tempers of the heart,

Whack their boys' limbs,

And, winding-footed in their shawl and sheet,

Groom the dark brides, the widows of the night

Fold in their arms.


The shades of girls, all flavoured from their shrouds,

When sunlight goes are sundered from the worm,

The bones of men, the broken in their beds,

By midnight pulleys that unhouse the tomb.


II


In this our age the gunman and his moll

Two one-dimensional ghosts, love on a reel,

Strange to our solid eye,

And speak their midnight nothings as they swell;

When cameras shut they hurry to their hole

down in the yard of day.


They dance between their arclamps and our skull,

Impose their shots, showing the nights away;

We watch the show of shadows kiss or kill

Flavoured of celluloid give love the lie.


III


Which is the world? Of our two sleepings, which

Shall fall awake when cures and their itch

Raise up this red-eyed earth?

Pack off the shapes of daylight and their starch,

The sunny gentlemen, the Welshing rich,

Or drive the night-geared forth.


The photograph is married to the eye,

Grafts on its bride one-sided skins of truth;

The dream has sucked the sleeper of his faith

That shrouded men might marrow as they fly.


IV


This is the world; the lying likeness of

Our strips of stuff that tatter as we move

Loving and being loth;

The dream that kicks the buried from their sack

And lets their trash be honoured as the quick.

This is the world. Have faith.


For we shall be a shouter like the cock,

Blowing the old dead back; our shots shall smack

The image from the plates;

And we shall be fit fellows for a life,

And who remains shall flower as they love,

Praise to our faring hearts.



Light breaks where no sun shines


Light breaks where no sun shines;

Where no sea runs, the waters of the heart

Push in their tides;

And, broken ghosts with glowworms in their heads,

The things of light

File through the flesh where no flesh decks the bones.


A candle in the thighs

Warms youth and seed and burns the seeds of age;

Where no seed stirs,

The fruit of man unwrinkles in the stars,

Bright as a fig;

Where no wax is, the candle shows it's hairs.


Dawn breaks behind the eyes;

From poles of skull and toe the windy blood

Slides like a sea;

Nor fenced, nor staked, the gushers of the sky

Spout to the rod

Divining in a smile the oil of tears.


Night in the sockets rounds,

Like some pitch moon, the limit of the globes;

Day lights the bone;

Where no cold is, the skinning gales unpin

The winter's robes;

The film of spring is hanging from the lids.


Light breaks on secret lots,

On tips of thought where thoughts smell in the rain;

When logics die,

The secret of the soil grows through the eye,

And blood jumps in the sun;

Above the waste allotments the dawn halts.



A Winter's Tale


It is a winter's tale

That the snow blind twilight ferries over the lakes

And floating fields from the farm in the cup of the vales,

Gliding windless through the hand folded flakes,

The pale breath of cattle at the stealthy sail,


And the stars falling cold,

And the smell of hay in the snow, and the far owl

Warning among the folds, and the frozen hold

Flocked with the sheep white smoke of the farm house cowl

In the river wended vales where the tale was told.


Once when the world turned old

On a star of faith pure as the drifting bread,

As the food and flames of the snow, a man unrolled

The scrolls of fire that burned in his heart and head,

Torn and alone in a farm house in a fold


Of fields. And burning then

In his firelit island ringed by the winged snow

And the dung hills white as wool and the hen

Roosts sleeping chill till the flame of the cock crow

Combs through the mantled yards and the morning men


Stumble out with their spades,

The cattle stirring, the mousing cat stepping shy,

The puffed birds hopping and hunting, the milkmaids

Gentle in their clogs over the fallen sky,

And all the woken farm at its white trades,


He knelt, he wept, he prayed,

By the spit and the black pot in the log bright light

And the cup and the cut bread in the dancing shade,

In the muffled house, in the quick of night,

At the point of love, forsaken and afraid.


He knelt on the cold stones,

He wept form the crest of grief, he prayed to the veiled sky

May his hunger go howling on bare white bones

Past the statues of the stables and the sky roofed sties

And the duck pond glass and the blinding byres alone


Into the home of prayers

And fires where he should prowl down the cloud

Of his snow blind love and rush in the white lairs.

His naked need struck him howling and bowed

Though no sound flowed down the hand folded air


But only the wind strung

Hunger of birds in the fields of the bread of water, tossed

In high corn and the harvest melting on their tongues.

And his nameless need bound him burning and lost

When cold as snow he should run the wended vales among


The rivers mouthed in night,

And drown in the drifts of his need, and lie curled caught

In the always desiring centre of the white

Inhuman cradle and the bride bed forever sought

By the believer lost and the hurled outcast of light.


Deliver him, he cried,

By losing him all in love, and cast his need

Alone and naked in the engulfing bride,

Never to flourish in the fields of the white seed

Or flower under the time dying flesh astride.


Listen. The minstrels sing

In the departed villages. The nightingale,

Dust in the buried wood, flies on the grains of her wings

And spells on the winds of the dead his winter's tale.

The voice of the dust of water from the withered spring


Is telling. The wizened

Stream with bells and baying water bounds. The dew rings

On the gristed leaves and the long gone glistening

Parish of snow. The carved mouths in the rock are wind swept strings.

Time sings through the intricately dead snow drop. Listen.


It was a hand or sound

In the long ago land that glided the dark door wide

And there outside on the bread of the ground

A she bird rose and rayed like a burning bride.

A she bird dawned, and her breast with snow and scarlet downed.


Look. And the dancers move

On the departed, snow bushed green, wanton in moon light

As a dust of pigeons. Exulting, the grave hooved

Horses, centaur dead, turn and tread the drenched white

Paddocks in the farms of birds. The dead oak walks for love.


The carved limbs in the rock

Leap, as to trumpets. Calligraphy of the old

Leaves is dancing. Lines of age on the stones weave in a flock.

And the harp shaped voice of the water's dust plucks in a fold

Of fields. For love, the long ago she bird rises. Look.


And the wild wings were raised

Above her folded head, and the soft feathered voice

Was flying through the house as though the she bird praised

And all the elements of the slow fall rejoiced

That a man knelt alone in the cup of the vales,


In the mantle and calm,

By the spit and the black pot in the log bright light.

And the sky of birds in the plumed voice charmed

Him up and he ran like a wind after the kindling flight

Past the blind barns and byres of the windless farm.


In the poles of the year

When black birds died like priests in the cloaked hedge row

And over the cloth of counties the far hills rode near,

Under the one leaved trees ran a scarecrow of snow

And fast through the drifts of the thickets antlered like deer,


Rags and prayers down the knee-

Deep hillocks and loud on the numbed lakes,

All night lost and long wading in the wake of the she-

Bird through the times and lands and tribes of the slow flakes.

Listen and look where she sails the goose plucked sea,


The sky, the bird, the bride,

The cloud, the need, the planted stars, the joy beyond

The fields of seed and the time dying flesh astride,

The heavens, the heaven, the grave, the burning font.

In the far ago land the door of his death glided wide,


And the bird descended.

On a bread white hill over the cupped farm

And the lakes and floating fields and the river wended

Vales where he prayed to come to the last harm

And the home of prayers and fires, the tale ended.


The dancing perishes

On the white, no longer growing green, and, minstrel dead,

The singing breaks in the snow shoed villages of wishes

That once cut the figures of birds on the deep bread

And over the glazed lakes skated the shapes of fishes


Flying. The rite is shorn

Of nightingale and centaur dead horse. The springs wither

Back. Lines of age sleep on the stones till trumpeting dawn.

Exultation lies down. Time buries the spring weather

That belled and bounded with the fossil and the dew reborn.


For the bird lay bedded

In a choir of wings, as though she slept or died,

And the wings glided wide and he was hymned and wedded,

And through the thighs of the engulfing bride,

The woman breasted and the heaven headed


Bird, he was brought low,

Burning in the bride bed of love, in the whirl-

Pool at the wanting centre, in the folds

Of paradise, in the spun bud of the world.

And she rose with him flowering in her melting snow.