Dylan Thomas - born a century ago today

Welsh poet Dylan Thomas was born on this day, 27 October, in the year 1914 in Swansea, Wales, UK. Astrotheme has his time of birth listed as 8.56pm.

His natal planets were a blend of Scorpio and Aquarius, in challenging square, an uneasy mix! If the birth time is accurate, ultra-sensitive Cancer would be his rising sign, the lens through which he viewed, and was viewed by, the world at large.

Pluto, his Scorpio Sun's ruler, in Cancer, is tightly conjunct Saturn, and is in harmonious trine to his Sun, and more widely to his Moon in late Aquarius - together these form a Grand Trine, a circuit of intense emotion, with a touch of the unexpected thrown in. The Grand Trine mostly reflects the poet's darkly emotional style, which often verges on the neurotic, a style difficult to describe and appreciate unless the reader has some similarity of nature. There's an undercurrent of despair, sometimes anger running through many of his poems. That anger comes courtesy of Mercury (writing and mental processes) conjunct Mars (anger, energy) in Scorpio (passionate emotion).

Neptune at 00 Leo opposite Uranus in Aquarius was an aspect between slow-moving outer planets shared by a whole age group. The dynamic pull between creativity, imagination and an avant garde style - for the times - is recognisable in many of his generation. This opposition of unruly Uranus and addictive Neptune is also in square, challenging aspect to his natal Sun, his history of alcohol abuse may connect here, also to the lack of grounding Earth planets in his natal chart.



In tribute to Dylan Thomas, a century later - his poem about his birthday:


Poem In October

It was my thirtieth year to heaven
Woke to my hearing from harbour and neighbour wood
And the mussel pooled and the heron
Priested shore
The morning beckon
With water praying and call of seagull and rook
And the knock of sailing boats on the net webbed wall
Myself to set foot
That second
In the still sleeping town and set forth.

My birthday began with the water-
Birds and the birds of the winged trees flying my name
Above the farms and the white horses
And I rose
In rainy autumn
And walked abroad in a shower of all my days.
High tide and the heron dived when I took the road
Over the border
And the gates
Of the town closed as the town awoke.

A springful of larks in a rolling
Cloud and the roadside bushes brimming with whistling
Blackbirds and the sun of October
Summery
On the hill's shoulder,
Here were fond climates and sweet singers suddenly
Come in the morning where I wandered and listened
To the rain wringing
Wind blow cold
In the wood faraway under me.

Pale rain over the dwindling harbour
And over the sea wet church the size of a snail
With its horns through mist and the castle
Brown as owls
But all the gardens
Of spring and summer were blooming in the tall tales
Beyond the border and under the lark full cloud.
There could I marvel
My birthday
Away but the weather turned around.

It turned away from the blithe country
And down the other air and the blue altered sky
Streamed again a wonder of summer
With apples
Pears and red currants
And I saw in the turning so clearly a child's
Forgotten mornings when he walked with his mother
Through the parables
Of sun light
And the legends of the green chapels

And the twice told fields of infancy
That his tears burned my cheeks and his heart moved in mine.
These were the woods the river and sea
Where a boy
In the listening
Summertime of the dead whispered the truth of his joy
To the trees and the stones and the fish in the tide.
And the mystery
Sang alive
Still in the water and singingbirds.

And there could I marvel my birthday
Away but the weather turned around. And the true
Joy of the long dead child sang burning
In the sun.
It was my thirtieth
Year to heaven stood there then in the summer noon
Though the town below lay leaved with October blood.
O may my heart's truth
Still be sung
On this high hill in a year's turning.

Children's Christmases in Wales or Wisconsin, Washington or Wichita.....

All the Christmases roll down toward the two-tongued sea, like a cold and headlong moon bundling down the sky that was our street; and they stop at the rim of the ice-edged, fish-freezing waves, and I plunge my hands in the snow and bring out whatever I can find. In goes my hands in the snow and bring out whatever I can find. In goes my hand into that wool-white bell-tongued ball of holidays resting at the rim of the carol-singing sea, and out come........... (This and all quotes below come from A Child's Christmas in Wales by Dylan Thomas.)

I decided to prepare a nice Christmassy post with some of the husband's vintage Found Photographs from his collection - Christmas scenes from the long ago, from early USA? That wasn't going to happen though. Few people, other than professional photographers and the extraordinarily wealthy, owned cameras; even those who did usually didn't have equipment advanced enough to take reasonable photographs indoors, away from bright daylight.

So, I found when searching my husband's collection of vintage photographs at Flickr and Lost Gallery, the earliest indoor Christmas snapshots come from the 1950s onward, no outdoor Christmas shots. As far as I can remember, back in England, if my parents owned a camera when I was very young it'd be a basic Box Brownie needing plenty of daylight to function properly, so I have no evidence of my own earliest Christmases; there was a war on, anyway.

Some Christmas photographs from husband's collection follow, quality varies, early Polaroid has its problems. It occurred to me that a few of these almost echo lines from Dylan Thomas's prose piece quoted (and linked) at the top of the post: A Child's Christmas in Wales. I've included the odd line from the piece here and there. Whether in Wales or Wisconsin, Washington, or Wichita, the Christmas experience for children is much the same.

I'd guess this first photograph is the earliest vintage Christmas photograph from the collection, restored somewhat by Himself.

Years and years ago, when I was a boy, when there were wolves in Wales, and birds the colour of red-flannel petticoats whisked past the harp-shapped hills..................

Get back to the presents................. troops of bright tin soldiers who, if they could not fight, could always run..........and Easy Hobbi-Games for Little Engineers, complete with instructions. Oh easy for Leonardo! .....Bags of moist and many-coloured jelly babies and a folded flag and a false nose and a tram-conductor's cap and a machine that punched tickets and rang a bell; never a catapult; once, by mistake that no one could explain, a little hatchet; and a celluloid duck that made, when you pressed it, a most unducklike sound, a mewing moo than an ambitious cat might make who wished to be a cow............

Mistletoe hung from the gas brackets in all the front parlors; there was sherry and walnuts and bottled beer and crackers by the dessertspoons; and cats in their fur-abouts watched the fires; and the high-heaped fire spat, all ready for the chestnuts and the mulling pokers.

......and some few small Aunts, not wanted in the kitchen, nor anywhere else for that matter, sat on the very edges of their chairs, posed and brittle, afraid to break, like faded cups and saucers.

Auntie Hannah laced her tea with rum, because it was only once a year....

I went to bed. Looking through my bedroom window, out into the moonlight and the unending smoke-coloured snow, I could see the lights in the windows of all the other houses on our hill and hear the music rising from them up the long, steadily falling night. I turned the gas down, I got into bed. I said some words to the close and holy darkness, and then I slept.

A couple of my husband's own Christmas photos, from when his four offspring were young, during the 1960s, when he still had lots of hair.

His (then) young family

This is one of mine from the early 1980s - I like it especially because it shows framed photographs of my parents and my grandparents (with my mother as a child) and a Christmas card to me from my much loved grandmother.

Reading the cards in my parents' living room.

A more recent photo (from a couple of years ago) noticed among the husband's Flickr collection - along with his caption:

A visit to Santa
“And what do you want for Christmas, little girl?” Santa asked Annie.
Annie whispered something in Santa’s ear.
Santa chuckled and bells sounded all around the room. He tilted his head and winked and touched Annie’s elbow.
The air sparkled all around Annie and then she slowly began to disappear.

Dylan Thomas, Son of Scorpio.

Welsh poet Dylan Thomas was born on this day, 27 October, in the year 1914 in Swansea, Wales, UK. Astrotheme has his time of birth listed as 8.56pm.

His natal planets were a blend of Scorpio and Aquarius, in challenging square, an uneasy mix! If the birth time is accurate, ultra-sensitive Cancer would be his rising sign, the lens through which he viewed, and was viewed by, the world at large. Pluto, his Scorpio Sun's ruler, in Cancer, exactly conjunct Saturn, and in trine to his Sun reflects the poet's darkly emotional style, which often verges on the neurotic, a style difficult to describe and appreciate unless the reader has some similarity of nature. There's an undercurrent of despair, sometimes anger running through many of his poems. That anger comes courtesy of Mercury (writing and mental processes) conjunct Mars (anger, energy) in Scorpio (passionate emotion).

Neptune at 00 Leo opposite Uranus in Aquarius was an aspect between slow-moving outer planets shared by a whole age group. The dynamic pull between creativity, imagination and an avant garde style, unusual for the times, is recognisable in many of his generation. This opposition of unruly Uranus and addictive Neptune is also in square, challenging aspect to his natal Sun, his history of alcohol abuse may connect here, also to the lack of grounding Earth planets in his natal chart.



In tribute to Dylan Thomas, on his birthday, I've chosen a poem I particularly like, one which has less of his dark uneasiness.

In The Beginning

In the beginning was the three-pointed star,
One smile of light across the empty face,
One bough of bone across the rooting air,
The substance forked that marrowed the first sun,
And, burning ciphers on the round of space,
Heaven and hell mixed as they spun.

In the beginning was the pale signature,
Three-syllabled and starry as the smile,
And after came the imprints on the water,
Stamp of the minted face upon the moon;
The blood that touched the crosstree and the grail
Touched the first cloud and left a sign.

In the beginning was the mounting fire
That set alight the weathers from a spark,
A three-eyed, red-eyed spark, blunt as a flower,
Life rose and spouted from the rolling seas,
Burst in the roots, pumped from the earth and rock
The secret oils that drive the grass.

In the beginning was the word, the word
That from the solid bases of the light
Abstracted all the letters of the void;
And from the cloudy bases of the breath
The word flowed up, translating to the heart
First characters of birth and death.

In the beginning was the secret brain.
The brain was celled and soldered in the thought
Before the pitch was forking to a sun;
Before the veins were shaking in their sieve,
Blood shot and scattered to the winds of light
The ribbed original of love.

Dylan Thomas &"A Child's Christmas in Wales"

Dylan Thomas was born on 27 October 1914 in Swansea, Wales, in the UK. Astrotheme has his time of birth listed as 8.56pm - Cancer ascendant. His personal planets were a blend of Scorpio and Aquarius, in challenging square - an uneasy mix. Venus in Sagittarius, Saturn conjunct Pluto in Cancer, and Neptune at 00 Leo complete the picture. No planets in Earth signs. Unruly Uranus and addictive Neptune oppose each other and square his natal Sun. His history of alcohol abuse may connect here, as well as to his lack of grounding Earth planets.

For all his challenges and failings, however, Dylan Thomas wrote like an angel.

At Christmas-time I love to read or listen to his story, "A Child's Christmas in Wales", a patchworked collection of his childhood Christmas memories. Read it in full HERE, or listen to him reading it, HERE.

A brief excerpt:

He begins:
"All the Christmases roll down toward the two-tongued sea, like a cold and headlong moon bundling down the sky that was our street; and they stop at the rim of the ice-edged fish-freezing waves, and I plunge my hands in the snow and bring out whatever I can find..........."

And Dylan Thomas found his hands filled with memories, which he delights in recording in his inimitable style, after which he draws to a close so...........

"The silent one-clouded heavens drifted on to the sea. Now we were snow-blind travelers lost on the north hills, and vast dewlapped dogs, with flasks round their necks, ambled and shambled up to us, baying "Excelsior."

We returned home through the poor streets where only a few children fumbled with bare red fingers in the wheel-rutted snow and cat-called after us, their voices fading away, as we trudged uphill, into the cries of the dock birds and the hooting of ships out in the whirling bay. And then, at tea the recovered Uncles would be jolly; and the ice cake loomed in the center of the table like a marble grave. Auntie Hannah laced her tea with rum, because it was only once a year.


Always on Christmas night there was music. An uncle played the fiddle, a cousin sang "Cherry Ripe," and another uncle sang "Drake's Drum." It was very warm in the little house. Auntie Hannah, who had got on to the parsnip wine, sang a song about Bleeding Hearts and Death, and then another in which she said her heart was like a Bird's Nest; and then everybody laughed again; and then I went to bed. Looking through my bedroom window, out into the moonlight and the unending smoke-colored snow, I could see the lights in the windows of all the other houses on our hill and hear the music rising from them up the long, steady falling night. I turned the gas down, I got into bed. I said some words to the close and holy darkness, and then I slept."



(3 Snowscape illustrations are of scenes far from Wales, but still compatible with Dylan Thomas' writing. They're by American artist/illustrator Maxfield Parrish)