Dylan Thomas, Robert Frost, and I

Well, if ever there was an arrogant opening to a blog post this would have to be it, I mean, even mentioning my name in the same breath as the two aforementioned giants seems sacrilegious, particularly as poetry and I aren’t the best of bedfellows. But there’s a point to all this beyond simply generating intellectual click-bait.

A pet peeve that’s doing the rounds lately is what I term ‘attribution OCD’ which, simply put, is the overriding desire to find a single, authoritative meaning for each and every sentence uttered by anyone; and the bigger the person and bigger the quote, the greater the drive. Social media seems to play a large part in this, pile-ons and cancel-culture enforcing the will of the majority, as does the change on societal norms as we reassess everything (incorrectly, I may add) in the past through the lens of the changing present. Academia is an object lesson in attribution OCD, the potent mix of intelligence, isolation, internal politics, entrenched power, and ‘publish or perish’ leading to blood-letting over exactly what Charlemagne meant when he spoke after his coronation.

We authors aren’t immune and, at times, seem to be at the head of the pack. Put a quote in your novel at your own risk, or god forbid your character actually retells something once said or seen, and here come the attribution OCD police with your own fellow authors at the head of the pack. ‘So and so didn’t actually mean that’, or ‘s/he’s been taken out of context for centuries’ or (better yet) ‘you can’t know what they meant, you’re the wrong gender/age/ethnicity/colour’ being the usual barbs hurled. All of which, quite simply, is garbage.

Unless (for instance) Charlemagne left an annotated copy of his post-coronation speech lying around Aachen to be picked up a few hundred years after his death, we’ll never know for sure exactly what he meant. It is, despite everything, conjecture and detective work on our part to get to the ‘truth’ (whatever that is). Yes, of course there are places where it’s absolutely crystal clear what someone means and their real intent but, as authors, we do have a tendency to slide a quote in here and there to bulwark a position we’re building with little real regard for anything else. So should we worry?

Of course not, and not because we’re above the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune (or outraged readers) but because quotations are actually another victim of relativity. There’s always more than one truth or meaning to everything ever said, one for the person uttering the accursed words, and one (or more) for anyone hearing them or reading them after the event. I’ve been victim to it, and a victim at the hands of both Frost and Thomas.

Let’s start in the USA (why not, they seem to think everything does anyway) with Robert Frost. About the only thing I took away from Mrs Armstrong’s English class in High School was Frost’s poem ‘Desert Places’. Yeah, me and about 1,000,000 other disturbed teenagers but, to refresh your memory, here it is in full (and do yourselves a favour, go buy his authorised collected works, it’ll help me get over the blatant copyright breach):

Snow falling and night falling fast, oh, fast

In a field I looked into going past,

And the ground almost covered smooth in snow,

But a few weeds and stubble showing last.

The woods around it have it--it is theirs.

All animals are smothered in their lairs.

I am too absent-spirited to count;

The loneliness includes me unawares.

And lonely as it is that loneliness

Will be more lonely ere it will be less--

A blanker whiteness of benighted snow

With no expression, nothing to express.

They cannot scare me with their empty spaces

Between stars--on stars where no human race is.

I have it in me so much nearer home

To scare myself with my own desert places.

It got into me because, as I read it over and over through the years, I thought to myself ‘yeah, here’s a guy who understands what it is to be, and to want to be, an introvert in a society of noise and connections’. A guy at peace with himself, with the silence inside, and feeling one with the winter outside. Until I read the commentary from those in the know who, politely if somewhat directly, made the point that Frost was in his suicidal phase as he wrote this and was cursing his life and the emptiness he saw in him. Two different views, diametrically opposed views, and I’m stuffed if I can find anything by Frost actually explaining what he meant. But even if he did, even if the experts are right and he was thinking of doing himself in, does that make me wrong and him right? Does it invalidate what the poem means to me, and how it speaks to me, and how it might speak to others with alternate views? I think not, and I suspect Frost might not care so much if it means everything to everyone depending on where they find themselves in life. Relativism at its best, perhaps.

But.

Enter Dylan Thomas and Do Not go Gentle into that Good Night. Now this one got me into a fight over a few drinks a few months ago. Yes, Northern Europe, late nights in sub-zero temperatures with a few drinks discussing poetry - might be your idea of hell but it was close to the other place for me. But I digress. This piece of Thomas’ brilliance is a favourite of my then-companion's who lauded it as a plea from the heart from one man to his father not to die. ‘Garbage,’ I replied, ‘I see it differently.’ So, again, here it is in full and, again, please buy his collected works from someone so I can at least pretend to be promoting his work.

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.

My take on the poem was that it is only those men (and I’m sorry ladies, Thomas only mentions men although I feel that, if he lived today, he would’ve included your good selves), that it is only those men who fail to reach for the heights they were capable of reaching that fight against death. I mean, to me ‘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’ seems pretty clear-cut. You don’t reach for the stars you know you might’ve touched, you fight against death. It’s only those men who’ve succeeded in life that slip away gently and, as Dylan says in the last stanza, you, Father, are not one of those so fight the grim reaper, hang around and do it. (There’s also, to me, an element of Thomas pointing to himself as a failure of his Father’s but that’s a story for another day. Perhaps.)

Again, absolute relativism, two opinions, both as valid as each other, both as hard-held and hard-fought, and with no Dylan Thomas around to explain what he meant (thankfully, I hear those Irish guys can pack it away and we only had two bottles between us). Who’s right, who’s wrong, are either of us either of them, and who cares? Dylan, like Frost, may simply have been happy we read him and remembered.

So back to authors and the attribution OCD police. It’s yet another one of the generally accepted tropes that needs to die, and die soon. There’s no central truth, no absolute, irrevocable, set-in-stone-handed-from-god meaning to anything said by anyone anywhere that you may care to quote in your works. There’s an original meaning by the utterer; a generally accepted meaning foisted by the masses; and the meaning that each of us gives to it when we encounter it. As authors, this last one is our key, what we do, and our only responsibility is to give the reader just enough extra so they can eke out what we intend. Or, better yet, do the opposite and let them take whatever meaning they need from it, from our works, and from us - because isn’t reading supposed to be an act of self-discovery, not spoon-fed truth from on high?

Until next time, stay safe people.

Oh, and by the way, I have absolutely no idea what Charlemagne did or didn’t say after his coronation but that doesn’t matter, it’s what I think he meant to say that does. Right?

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