A Dream of Winter by Dylan Thomas
PN Review 226, November - December 2015
A Dream of Winter
Very often on winter nights the halfshaped moonlight sees
Men through a window of leaves and lashes marking gliding
Into the grave an owl-tongued childhood of birds and cold trees,
Or drowned beyond water in the sleepers’ fish-trodden churches
Watching the cry of the seas as snow flies sparkling, riding,
The ice lies down shining, the sandgrains skate on the beeches.
Often she watches through men’s midnight windows, their winter eyes,
The conjured night of the North rain in a firework flood,
The Great Bear raising the snows of his voice to burn the skies.
And men may sleep a milkwhite path through the chill, struck still waves
Or walk on thunder and air in the frozen, birdless wood
On the eyelid of the North where only the silence moves,
Asleep may stalk among lightning and hear the statues speak,
The hidden tongue in the melting garden sing like a thrush
And the soft snow drawing a bellnote from the marble cheek,
Drowned fast asleep beyond water and sound may mark the street
Ghost-deep in lakes where the rose-cheeked nightmare glides like a fish,
The Ark drifts on the cobbles, the darkness sails in a fleet,
Or, lying down still, may clamber the snow-exploded hill
Where the caverns hide the snowbull’s ivory splinter,
Fossil spine of the sea-boned seal, iceprint of pterodactyl.
Oh birds, trees, fish and bears, singing statues, Arkfloods and seals
Steal from their sleeper awake as he waits in the winter
Morning, alone in his world, staring at the London wheels.
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A note on ‘A Dream of Winter’
This poem was published in the January 1942 issue of the magazine Lilliput, one stanza under each of eight photographs on the subject of winter. The photographs were of, in sequence: a crescent moon over a hillside trees in mist (by ‘Brandt’); a man silhouetted standing on a frozen lake, holding an axe (about to hack at the ice) (by ‘Fox’); a steam-breathing polar bear on an icicle-fringed promontory in a zoo enclosure (by ‘Darchan’); three men descending a misty hillside at night (by ‘Land’); a frost-etched statues of a classical female figure, bare to the waist, in a park (by ‘Land’); a canal between factories reflecting a distant light (by ‘Fox’); three ice-pick alpinists wearing crampons ascending a glacier (by ‘Brassai’); a man holding an umbrella standing in snow beside a busy slushy London street (by ‘Glass’).
The article is introduced by a short paragraph below the first photograph: ‘Out of thousands of winter pictures we chose these eight because they seemed to us to have a curious dreamlike quality. We showed them to the young poet, Dylan Thomas, and asked him if he would like to write some verses to go with them. Here are the pictures and here is his poem’. Thomas himself referred to the poem in a letter to John Sommerfield of 6 January 1942: ‘Glad you liked my winter verses, very quickly produced from my tame Swinburne machine’ (CL, 557). The piece has never been collected, to my knowledge, although Ferris explains the reference in a footnote.
As so often, Thomas was being too modest. Although it is not as densely- wrought as other wartime poems, being a commercial commission, ‘A Dream of Winter’ plays imaginatively with its photographic images, but is also a stand-alone work with its own verbal logic, anticipating a later style based on repetition.
John Goodby
This poem by Dylan Thomas, and note by John Goodby, is taken from PN Review 226, November - December 2015. More poetry, features, reviews and reports from across the back catalogue are accessible to paying subscribers.