“I See the Boys of Summer”
by
Dylan Thomas
I SEE
THE BOYS OF SUMMER
I
I see
the boys of summer in their ruin
Lay
the gold tithings barren,
Setting
no store by harvest, freeze the soils;
There
in their heat the winter floods
Of
frozen loves they fetch their girls,
And
drown the cargoed apples in their tides.
These
boys of light are curdlers in their folly,
Sour
the boiling honey;
The
jacks of frost they finger in the hives;
There
in the sun the frigid threads
Of
doubt and dark they feed their nerves;
The
signal moon is zero in their voids.
I see
the summer children in their mothers
Split
up the brawned womb's weathers,
Divide
the night and day with fairy thumbs;
There
in the deep with quartered shades
Of
sun and moon they paint their dams
As
sunlight paints the shelling of their heads.
I see
that from these boys shall men of nothing
Stature
by seedy shifting,
Or
lame the air with leaping from its heats;
There
from their hearts the dogdayed pulse
Of
love and light bursts in their throats.
O see
the pulse of summer in the ice.
II
But
seasons must be challenged or they totter
Into
a chiming quarter
Where,
punctual as death, we ring the stars;
There,
in his night, the black-tongued bells
The
sleepy man of winter pulls,
Nor
blows back moon-and-midnight as she blows.
We
are the dark deniers, let us summon
Death
from a summer woman,
A
muscling life from lovers in their cramp,
From
the fair dead who flush the sea
The
bright-eyed worm on Davy's lamp,
And
from the planted womb the man of straw.
We
summer boys in this four-winded spinning,
Green
of the seaweeds' iron,
Hold
up the noisy sea and drop her birds,
Pick
the world's ball of wave and froth
To
choke the deserts with her tides,
And
comb the county gardens for a wreath.
In
spring we cross our foreheads with the holly,
Heigh
ho the blood and berry,
And
nail the merry squires to the trees;
Here
love's damp muscle dries and dies,
Here
break a kiss in no love's quarry.
O see
the poles of promise in the boys.
III
I see
you boys of summer in your ruin.
Man
in his maggot's barren.
And
boys are full and foreign in the pouch.
I am
the man your father was.
We
are the sons of flint and pitch.
O see
the poles are kissing as they cross.
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COMMENTARY
First
of all, this commentary is
going to focus on
one of the
works written by
David Dylan Thomas, “I see
the boys of
summer”. This poem belongs to
the first book or
collection of this author, it
is called Eighteen Poems, Fortune Press, published in
1934, when Dylan was
young, nineteen and twenty years old. Dylan was one of the most exciting
young poets writing in the English Language. (Dylan Thomas boathouse &
Dylan Thomas- Wikipedia, the free encylopedia). Apart of the typical analysis
of the poem I am going to try to explain the most important aspect about the
Anglo-Welsh literature of Dylan Thomas.
“Dylan Thomas was born in Swansea, Wales, in
1914 and came of age as a poet in the early 1930s, a period of economic
turmoil, social radicalism and the supersession of high modernism by new
literary styles”. (Dylan Thomas boathouse).
“Dylan Thomas is considered the best known
Anglo- Welsh poet but also the greatest 20th century poet writing in
English. The Anglo-Welsh literature is a term used to describe works written in
the English language by Welsh writers, especially if they either have subject
matter relating to Wales or are influenced by the Welsh language in term of
patterns of usage or syntax. It has been recognised as a distinctive entity
only since the 20th century. These authors write about
“Dylan’s father, who was a writer and
possessed a degree in English, brought his son up to speak English rather than
Dylan’s mother’s native Welsh”. (Dylan Thomas- Wikipedia, the
free encylopedia). This was one of the reasons that made him write in the
English language. Another reason, I think, is that Thomas was in
Now I am
going to analyse the
poem that I have chosen, “I see
the boys of
summer”.
“I see the boys of summer” is a poem in
which three people speak and tell their feelings. The poem seems on the surface
to be about the boys’ future that a man sees and their own future that
the boys see.
Dylan Thomas opens the first part of the poem
expressing a critic; he is a person that critiques the situation of the boys.
The speaker does not predict anything good for these boys. He says that when they will reach the
maturity maybe they will have feelings, thoughts or problems that now do not
exist. In the last stanza the poet speaks and defends the situation of those
boys.
In the second part of the poem, the boys defend their
interests and ideas. They explain what they think; the boys think that they
have to live their life and do not think about the future, it would be to be at
the mercy of death and not life, I
mean that boys would be waiting for death and they will not be able to live
their life. In this part of the poem we could say a reference to sex appears,
it is the last line of this part “O
see the poles of promise in the boys”. I think so because here the
word “poles” refers to people, when a man and a woman are a couple,
this includes sex.
In the third and last part of the poem is the critic
who talks about another time. He has the same thought as he had at the
beginning of the poem. Here the critic emphasizes that the boys will fall in
their ruin, destroyed by the maggot that live in each man. The boys are
proclaimed “sons of flint and pitch”.
Finally, the poet finishes the poem saying the poles are really only one:
“O see the poles are kissing as
they cross”.
The meaning in the poem is straightforward, while you
are reading you can understand what the author is talking about and referring
to. I mean that this is not a very complex poem when talking about language.
Dylan Thomas uses clear connotations to refer to what he wants to mean. We can
say that Dylan, in this poem, “I see the boys of summer”, does not
use an elaborate language. The author dedicated the poem to boys’ future,
the passing of time. By means of the different speakers, Dylan Thomas explains
his ideas. The boys that appear in the poem, in my opinion they represent the
boys of
“I see the boys of summer” could be
autobiographical. Maybe Dylan tells us his own story as a boy, and the critic
could be the typical man of a town that is always criticising young people.
With regard to the length of the poem, “I see
boys of summer” is fifty-four lines, it is written in a nine stanza
structure and it is divided into three parts. The first and the second part
have four stanzas and the third stanza has only one stanza. Each stanza is six
lines long. The rhyme scheme is quite irregular during the course of the poem.
“The main themes of Dylan Thomas’ poetry
are nostalgia, life, death, and loss of innocence. Dylan wrote about his past
as a boy or as a young man. And
In this poem that I have chosen, “I see the boys
of summer”, I think that a lot of boys could feel identified, especially
boys that live in towns or villages, since old people is always criticising
young people. When I read the poem once I though that it was a dialogue between
a group of boys and a man, but now I do not think so. It is a story told from
different points of view. Dylan
Thomas immerses the reader in the theme and at the same time the poem makes you
think about what it is saying, the real life, the passing of time. “I see
the boys of summer” is composed by simple words and especially has a
simple theme. I think that there is nothing confusing or complex.
by Merce Quiralte Moragues.
(27 April 2006)
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BIBLIOGRAPHY
Cited Web
Pages:
-Dylan Thomas boathouse. Victor
Golightly.2003.Visited 2 May 2006.
http://www.dylanthomasboathouse.com/download/essay1.pdf
- Dylan Thomas- Wikipedia, the free
encylopedia. Wikimedia
Foundations. 1 May 2006. Visited 2 May 2006.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dylan_Thomas
- Anglo-Welsh literature- Wikipedia,
the free encylopedia. Wikimedia
Foundations. 21 January 2006. Visited 2 May 2006.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anglo-Welsh_literature
- BBC- Wales- Dylan Thomas- The
writer. Joe Goodden. Visited 2 May 2006.
http://bbc.co.uk/wales/dylanthomas/biography/pages/writer.shtml
Sources:
- Poems by Dylan Thomas.
webmaster@internal.org. 07 June 2005. Visited 2 May 2006.
http://www.internal.org/list_poems.phtml?authorID=6
Academic year 2005/2006
© a.r.e.a./Dr.Vicente Forés López
© Merce Quiralte Moragues
mamerqui@alumni.uv.es
Universitat de València Press