Poem in October by Dylan Thomas Study Guide
Introduction of the Poem
Dylan Thomasโ โPoem in Octoberโ is a seven-stanza poem divided into ten-line sets. Thomas, as was his custom, did not adopt a specific rhyme pattern. However, there are a few instances where end sounds are unified by the use of half rhyme. In stanza three, the words โrollingโ and โwhistlingโ have a consonant rhyme. In stanza five, the end words โsummerโ and โmotherโ rhyme in the same way. There are moments of assonance, or rhymes that rely on vowel sounds, in these words that rely on consonants to rhyme. One such example is the first stanzaโs use of the terms โheronโ and โbeckon.โ
While there is no rhyme or rhythm scheme to tie the poemโs stanzas together, the lines are obviously similar in length and indentation. When one looks at the lines on the page, this is a feature that stands out. There are three lengthier lines followed by two extremely short lines. In each stanza, these are followed by two more long lines, two more short lines, and one last long line. They cause the readerโs eye to wander back and forth across the page, maybe replicating the rise and fall of waves, the โwringingโ of rain, or the speakerโs ascent up the hill. The complete poem can be found here.
Summary of the Poem
Dylan Thomasโ poem โPoem in Octoberโ describes a speakerโs trek out of autumn and up a hill to recapture childhood delight, the summer season, and his spirituality.
The speaker begins the poem by claiming that he was thirty years old when he composed it. It was his birthday, so he decided to go for a walk. He left his house and walked along the waterโs edge, listening to the seabirds and the sounds of the woods.
The speaker left town and began climbing a neighbouring hill. The town shrank as he soared. Simultaneously, the season began to shift. Autumn and its cold air moved away, giving way to summer. The rain and the presence of birds persisted as he ascended. These two images are critical to the speakerโs comprehension of happiness and childhood.
When he eventually made it to the top of the hill, he felt as if he had arrived in heaven. He was far above the cold of October, and he became obsessed with boyhood recollections. The speaker recalls visiting him with his mother and what it meant to him. While atop the hill, he hoped that the happiness he felt would continue the entire year. Perhaps he will return to recover it when he reaches the age of thirty-one.
Analysis of Poem in October
The speaker begins the opening stanza of โPoem in Octoberโ by declaring that he was thirty years old. He expresses his age in terms of years progressing towards death or heaven. He is thirty years older than he was when he was born, and he is thirty years closer to death. The following sentences are excellent instances of Thomasโs inventive use of nouns and adjectives. The shore was โPriestedโ by herons, he said. They are everywhere, lording over a territory that has a spiritual character because to Thomasโ use of the word โpriestedโ rather than another word like โruled.โ
This is one among the numerous sights and sounds that Thomasโ speaker awoke to this morning. There was also the waterfront and the โneighbour woodโ to hear. He might hear the noises of rustling leaves or small animals running and walking from there.
These noises are agreeable to the ear of the speaker. They “beckon” or “call” him out of bed and into the world. In the next lines, the water is personified in the same way that the sunrise is. It is referred to as “praying.” As if kneeling in prayer, the waves dip and rise. The scene, like many that would come after it, is overwhelming. There are sights and noises that the speaker wishes to take in. These include the sounds of seagulls calling and boats crashing against the dock’s “webbed wall.”
The speaker declares at the end of these lines that he “set foot” in that “moment.” The town was “still sleeping,” but as has been amply demonstrated, the rest of the globe isn’t. What is unclear at this moment is where the speaker is going.
Stanza Two begins with the speaker reminding the reader that it is his birthday. He just turned thirty, and he is going on a celebratory walk. He notices the “water-/Birds” again, as well as those that fly into and around the trees. They all appear to be focused on him, “flying” his “name” around the neighbouring “farms and white horses.” It is interesting that the speaker picked this period to mention the fields and horses. The setting is a little jumbled, as if the speaker were recalling several landscapes and weaving them together. The “white horses” could also allude to the waves themselves.
The speaker is willing to continue on this trek for a while longer and rises in the โrainy autumnโ to do so.
โwalkโฆabroad.โ He also discusses how his actions affect the environment around him. The waves crashed and the heron โdivedโ into the sea just as he was getting up.
The speaker departs from the town in the closing lines of this section. He mentions a โborderโ he must cross and โgatesโ he must open. Whether or whether these are real, they were previously a hindrance to him exiting the enclosed area. They are no longer. The town begins to wake up as his spot in town closes behind him.
The environment in Stanza Three is absolutely active and feels more like summer or spring than October. He extends on this idea by referring to the โOctober sunโ as โSummery,โ or similar to summer. It is perched on the โhillโs shoulder,โ yet another example of personification. Now that you have read this far into the piece, you can see why Thomas uses personification so frequently. He wanted to make the entire universe come to life for the reader.
He describes the area as having โsweet singers and fond climates.โ In these lines, the speaker mentions the birds once more, as well as the โrain.โ These are two of the poemโs key images, which appear repeatedly. โCome in the morning,โ the birds say, as they have in prior stanzas. They appear in the same location as the speaker walked and meandered. He notices the wind wringing the rain and blowing โcold / In the wood farawayโ under him.
The choice of the word โfarawayโ in these lines is intriguing. The wind and rain are under him, but they are also far away. This can be understood in a different, more fleeting manner. The rain is far away in the sense that it is โdreamlike,โ or mentally remote. This is more appropriate for Thomasโ words and the environment he has constructed.
The speaker returns to the rain in Stanza Four. It is now referred to as โPaleโ and is said to be looming over the โdwindling harbour.โ He resumes his ascent of the slope. He moves further away from the boats and dock where he began. The next lines are a delightful tangle of imagery that are typical of Dylan Thomas.
He has ventured far beyond the townโs bounds and into his own nature-inspired dream. It is a spot where he can โmarvelโ at the spring and summer gardens. They are flowering โin tall tales.โ This gives the reader a hint regarding the actuality of the word being described by the speaker. It is a โtall tale,โ or a falsehood, rather than a real site he may visit.
The final words of stanza five describe how, from the hill, he could โmarvelโ at the โweather,โ but that as soon as he got there, it began to move away.
In โPoem in October,โ Stanza Five refers to the transition from autumn to summer. The speaker is consumed by the delight of the day, which is only heightened by the beauty of the surroundings. When he looks around, he sees all of summerโs wonders. He recalls all the times he is been here as a child. His recollections of a period when the world was coloured are returning to him.
โRed currantsโ and โgreen chapelsโ can be found. Everything was vibrant and unadulterated.
He recalls coming to the same hill with his โmotherโ in the mornings. โThrough parables,โ the speaker said. These are stories with a moral or spiritual underpinning. They are mentioned throughout the Bible and are directly related to the โgreen chapelsโ in verse ten. It is unclear why the speaker remembers the chapel as green, perhaps because of the green environment in which it was located. In Stanza Six, as the poem nears its conclusion, the speaker delves further into his memories. He considers himself to be so dissimilar to the boy that they are two distinct individuals. โHis tears burned [his] cheeks,โ he recalls. The speaker perceives the young boyโs heart to be remote from his own. Through these lines, the speaker emphasises that, while he has retuned to this location and is once again experiencing joy, it is nothing compared to the โtruth ofโฆjoyโ he knew during his youthโs โSummertime.โ
The โdeadโ of his past, the summer days he can no longer access, remind him of his life and his relationship with the world.
โThe mysteryโ was sung over the world. This is the type of spiritual connection that the speaker began to value less as he grew older. He recalls it now and sees it specifically inside the โwater and singingbirds.โ The sentences are not dismal in tone while reflecting on the changes that have occurred in the man since his childhood. They are as upbeat and joyous as the ones before them.
Stanza Seven contains the final ten lines of โPoem in October,โ in which the speaker describes how the โjoyโ of his childhood returned to him on his thirtyth birthday and what that meant to him. On his birthday, he was able to visit this location. The weather changes, as it always does. He is in the sun and is witnessing the joy of the long-dead childโs song blazing.
He mentions the fact that this was his โthirtieth / Year to heaven.โ He has risen as close to paradise as he would ever get in his life. The speaker has left the autumn weather that surrounds and contains the โtown belowโ and has gone somewhere for his birthday, to a dreamland of warmth, joy, and childhood. In the final lyrics, he requests that his delight remain on the hill and be sung โin a yearโs turning.โ
Critical Interpretation of The Poem
โPoem in Octoberโ was written around 1944 and is one of Dylan Thomasโs four birthday poems. The others are โEspecially When the October Windโ (for his twentieth birthday), โTwenty-Four Yearsโ (for his twenty-fourth birthday), and โPoem on His Birthdayโ (to commemorate his thirty-fifth birthday). It is a mystic re-creation of his childhood given in more lucid words than in his earlier poems (in fact, this as well as an element of tranquilly have been two generally remarked characteristics of his later works such as โPoem in Octoberโ, โFern Hillโ, and โOver Sir Johnโs Hillโ). This poem is also an example of Thomasโs obsession with the interplay of creation and destruction, life and death, and the ritual invocation of the moment of birth at the poemโs beginning ushers in a celebration of this continuous process and the workings of biological processes as a part of the natural world that connect generations of life (as the adult Thomas does in the poem while walking with his mother) as well as hu This demonstrates his commitment to the cyclical biological processes of birth and death, decay (or degeneration), and regeneration, which he articulates through an emphasis on the โintensity and integrity of non-human organic lifeโ (Davies: 69). This results in a degree of humility, which translates into the human being able to abandon its ego and get assimilated into such a life within nature.
This involvement underpins and informs issues such as physical processes, infancy, nature, and even poetry. When the poet wakes up on the morning of his 30th birthday, he is greeted by the sounds and sights of nature, which appear to commemorate the occasion. With this, he is forced to recall his history and picture himself as a youngster with his mother in the familiar Welsh landscape. As the poet emerges from the town that appears to be a womb, he is overwhelmed by the physical metamorphosis of the gloomy autumn weather into June sunlight and a โspringful of larks.โ This is complemented by the poetโs mature self-being transformed into the poet as a child, which is more figurative. All of this is accompanied by a โsacramentalisingโ of nature, that is, the superimposition of certain Christian rituals (like baptism) on natural events (such as birds โ both water and land birds โ crying out in the morning; the town on the edge of the sea, water being an important element in baptism; nature in terms of a โgreen chapelโ; and the use of the phrase โheron-priestedโ because in Celtic folklore and mythology, birds like the It also has a sense of majesty in the natural world. Because Thomas sees the child as more organically connected to nature and its cyclical processes, the poem revolves around the childโs delight and joy in a natural setting. This serves as the foundation for the poetโs exploration of the meeting of religious, spiritual, and physical/material aspects in the childโs wonder and absorption in nature that this organicity implies (for example, in expressions like โparables/ Of sunlightโ that the child appears to learn from his mother in the โgreen chapelsโ).
The poem can also be considered as part of a long tradition of English poetry (seen in works like as Henry Vaughanโs โRegenerationโ and Wordsworthโs โOde on the Intimations of Immortalityโ) that places a โreflection of manโs moodsโ in a pastoral setting (Davies: 52). Again, the setting for the poem is Laugharne in Carmarthenshire, in Dylan Thomasโ native Wales, and the hill referred to is most likely Sir Johnโs Hill in the same location. As a result, Thomas referred to the poem as a โLaugharne poem,โ the first โplace poemโ he had composed (Goodby and Wigginton: 198). Images of the sea, water, the heron, โgreen chapels,โ and other natural phenomena reinforce the poemโs pantheistic nature. At the same time, the image of the sea (which is essential to many of Thomasโs great poems) is a โnon-location redolent of margins, swamping, self-loss, and erasure,โ according to Goodby (Goodby and Wigginton: 200). The poem is focused on being in several realms, with the sea imagery serving as the primary support.
In this regard, the figure of the Bard becomes significant, especially when one considers that when Thomas went to his first public reading in the United States of America, he was introduced as โhaving come โout of the druidical mists of Walesโ (Davies: 96). In ancient Wales (and related civilizations in Ireland, Scotland, and elsewhere), a poet was not just a professional writer of verse but was also recognised to wield enormous spiritual power. Furthermore, the bard was more than just a respected member of the community; he was one with the people, their voice. He sang the peopleโs songs, upheld their basic traditions, and kept poetry and music alive and personally significant. In the 1980s, Ackerman and many other critics saw Thomas as claiming a lofty function for the poet as a prophet in terms of the bard. With the exuberance of the bardic personality, the fondness for ceremonial and complex ritual coexisted with a devotion to composition and workmanship in Thomas, connecting him yet again to the bardicโs impulsive but rigorously technical poetry approach. Another essential characteristic of old Welsh poetry that Thomas seemed to incorporate was a recognition of realityโs dual nature, of unity in disunity, of the simultaneity of life and death, and of time as an illusion.
Rather than being divided into the past, present, and future, the eternal continuous moment is divided into the past, present, and future.
Important Themes of the Poem
The following are the main themes of the poem.
The Welsh Origins:
Dylan Thomasโ Welsh heritage is a prominent theme in his work. He settled in southwest Wales, in Carmarthenshire and Cardiganshire, now known as Ceredigion, regions that drew him throughout his life. Initially viewed as a Romantic and a โprovincial,โ Thomasโ poetry was thought to be influenced by the Welsh language, its rhythms, and the Bardic tradition. For example, in his book Welsh Dylan: Dylan Thomasโs Life, Writing, and His Wales (1980), John Ackerman saw his poetry as the product of a strongly individual imagination fostered by Welsh ways of thought and feeling and distinguished by its lyrical quality, strict formal control, a romantic conception of the poetโs function, and a religious attitude toward experience. Ackerman cites three ways in which his Welsh heritage influenced his poetry. First, there was the direct and unavoidable influence of a specific community with specific traditions, such as the bardic tradition; second, there was the influence of other Welshmen writing in English (Thomas did not speak Welsh) and who helped to create a national consciousness, a sense of a life that was unique to Wales. Thomas gained access to a community of ideas from Welsh culture through these connections. According to Ackerman, the third effect of the Welsh background on Thomas was the cultural tradition that existed in and through the Welsh language.
Identity Issues in the Face of Changes Caused by Time:
Dylan Thomasโs poetry also documents the pain of World War II. โPoem in Octoberโ was published in the collection Deaths and Entrances (1946) and is significant because it contrasts with the majority of the other poems in the collection, which reveal vivid accounts of Germanyโs bombing of London during the War. It explores the terrible entry of the war into peopleโs ordinary, private lives, as well as the ramifications for the poetic self. Given this, the poem appears to be occupied by a sense of nostalgia for the past in the face of unfathomable horror. Despite its pastoral and serene tone, the poem has an elegiac tone that questions the happiness linked with birthdays because they bring us closer to death. Given the volumeโs abundance of death and general tone of sadness, the poem concludes on a hopeful note regarding the poetโs function in such a situation:
โO may my heartโs truth
Still be sung
On this high hill in a yearโs turning.โ
The title of the volume โDeaths and Entrancesโ is vividly reflected in โPoem in Octoberโ by the continuous allusions to โturningโ as the poet departs from the bounds of the town to climb up the hill, only to return to the town.
An Idea of Modernism
Thomas is also associated with Modernism. The sceneries and imagery, as well as the hallucinatory effect of the visions he inspires in his poetry, appear to approach surrealism, which is more linked with modernist writersโ imaginative and psychological studies. While the Surrealists achieved this effect by the arbitrary or irrational juxtaposition of pictures, Thomas, even when employing an interior landscape of the mind, picked, controlled, and developed his images into a conscious poetic order that served an aesthetic function. Davies, on the other hand, claims that Thomas has affinities with modernism in that he believed in โconcreteness of presentation,โ which Davies describes as โthe final barrier that Modernismโฆhad placed against any return to Victorian discursiveness or Georgian descriptivenessโ (Davies in Goodby and Wigginton: 115). Second, Thomas exhibits a form of self-consciousness in his use of language, which is another fundamental Modernist characteristic: โthe conscious foregrounding of language as language, language itself as theme, within poems.โ