I’m never quite sure whether or not I like the poetry of Dylan Thomas (1914–1953). These days, he’s in danger of becoming one of those poets, like Byron or Rupert Brooke, whose life and premature death overshadows what they wrote.
It’s hard to know where to “place” Thomas; he was a bit of a one-off. There’s no doubt that he had a very individual and unusual way of writing, perhaps showing the influence of the Welsh language. The poem below is densely packed with imagery, a sort of extended metaphor to do with money and fairground attractions.
This evocation of conjuring tricks is entirely appropriate for the theme of false friendship, of looking back and realising that one’s friends were not quite what one took them to be at the time.
I don’t know about Thomas’ work in general, but I admire this poem very much, both for what it says and the way it says it.
To Others Than You by Dylan Thomas
Friend by enemy I call you out.
You with a bad coin in your socket,
You my friend there with a winning air
Who palmed the lie on me when you looked
Brassily at my shyest secret,
Enticed with twinkling bits of the eye
Till the sweet tooth of my love bit dry,
Rasped at last, and I stumbled and sucked,
Whom now I conjure to stand as thief
In the memory worked by mirrors,
With unforgettably smiling act,
Quickness of hand in the velvet glove
And my whole heart under your hammer,
Were once such a creature, so gay and frank
A desireless familiar
I never thought to utter or think
While you displaced a truth in the air,
That though I loved them for their faults
As much as for their good,
My friends were enemies on stilts
With their heads in a cunning cloud.
The Good Reader 