Scottish Country Dance of the Day

If you are a fan of lyric poetry reading when not dancing, you are no doubt familiar with verses from one of Dylan Thomas’s most celebrated poems, Fern Hill, captures the golden haze of childhood remembered through the lens of time. The imagery is lush, pastoral, and musical:

“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.”

But the innocence of youth is eventually tempered by the inevitability of time, and the poem closes with a haunting, lyrical surrender:

“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.”

Another of his most iconic works is Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night, a villanelle written as Thomas’s father approached death. Its opening lines have become an anthem of defiance in the face of mortality:

“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.”

And its final stanza, addressed directly to his father, is both a plea and an expression of love:

“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.”

For more on the special prize awarded on Dylan Thomas Day, click the portrait of Dylan Thomas, taken near bomb-damaged buildings in Soho, London, 1945.