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Dylan Thomas's "Poem in October" has to be one of the most rapturously beautiful poems of childhood ever written in the language. The narrative line of the poem is easily paraphrased (not always the case in Thomas's work): the speaker awakens to his "thirtieth year to heaven," the harbor's sea-sounds (Thomas grew up in Swansea, Wales), embarks upon the "still sleeping town," and "In rainy autumn" ascends the hill above the town, recollecting "a child's / Forgotten mornings."
But it's the alternation of the adult speaker's present with the "twice told fields of infancy" and "truth of his joy" that gives the poem such poignancy. In a very real sense, this is a childhood that is blessed and in which the wonders of nature are sacramentalized: "the heron priested shore," "the parables / Of sun light / And the legends of the green chapels. . . / And the mystery / Sang alive / Still in the water and singingbirds." Thomas effectively juxtaposes blithe images of spring and summer--larks, blackbirds, sun, fruit, "the blue altered sky"--with the town's autumnal "rain wringing / Wind blow cold / In the wood faraway under me."
Consider also the speaker's brilliant cinematic perspective, and the extended metaphor of the snail here: "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." Or the way Thomas's ear works with alliteration and onomotopeia: "call of seagull and rook / And the knock of sailing boats on the net webbed wall."
Still, the poem turns as "the weather turned around. And the true / Joy of the long dead child sang burning / In the sun," because, as Thomas implies elsewhere, time holds us captive and thus the child is expelled from his Edenic joy, innocence, and grace, which the speaker can only sing or praise in memory.
Opacities abound in Thomas's work, I think, because the poet employed an imagery that was often private and inaccessible, despite his obvious debt to the Bible, Shakespeare and Welsh song. Those obscurities can be formidable. Still, at the least, the reader should go to Dylan Thomas for the rapture of "Poem in October," "Fern Hill," and "The force that through the green fuse drives the flower," the wisdom in "Do not go gentle into that good night," and for the poet's credo of "In My Craft or Sullen Art."
