Top 138 Quotes & Sayings by Dylan Thomas - Page 3

In the beginning was the word, the word That from the solid bases of the light Abstracted all the letters of the void.

Let the dry eyes perceive Others betray the lamenting lies of their losses By the curve of the nude mouth or the laugh up the sleeve.

And time cast forth my mortal creature To drift or drown upon the seas Acquainted with the salt adventure Of tides that never touch the shores. - I who was rich was made the richer By sipping at the the vine of days.

This bread I break was once the oat, This wine upon a foreign tree Plunged in its fruit; Man in the day or wind at night Laid the crops low, broke the grape's joy.

In the beginning was the secret brain. The brain was celled and soldered in the thought

Families, like countries, take their prophets unkindly, but a verse-speaker in the house is dishonor to be hooted.

This poem has been called obscure. I refuse to believe that it is obscurer than pity, violence, or suffering. But being a poem, not a lifetime, it is more compressed.

Oh as I was young and easy in the mercy of his means, Time held me green and dying Though I sang in my chains like the sea.

And on seesaw Sunday nights, I'd woo who ever I would with my wicked eye!

Love drips & gathers, but the fallen blood Shall calm her sores..." -Thomas, The Force that through the green fuse drives the flower.

Chastity prays for me, piety sings, Innocence sweetens my last black breath, Modesty hides my thighs in her wings, And all the deadly virtues plague my death!

Shall I let in the stranger, Shall I welcome the sailor, Or stay till the day I die? Hands of the stranger and holds of the ships, Hold you poison or grapes?

And from the first declension of the flesh I learnt man's tongue, to twist the shapes of thoughts Into the stony idiom of the brain.

In my craft or sullen art Exercised in the still night When only the moon rages And the lovers lie abed With all their griefs in their arms, I labour by singing light Not for ambition or bread Or the strut and trade of charms On the ivory stages But for the common wages Of their most secret heart. Not for the proud man apart From the raging moon I write On these spindrift pages Nor for the towering dead With their nightingales and psalms But for the lovers, their arms Round the griefs of the ages, Who pay no praise or wages Nor heed my craft or art.

All world was one, one windy nothing, My world was christened in a stream of milk.

This world is half the devil's and my own, Daft with the drug that's smoking in a girl and curling round the bud that forks her eye.

I do not remember-that is the point-the first impulse that pumped and shoved most of the earlier poems along, and they are still too near me, with their vehement beat-pounding black and green rhythms like those of a very young policeman exploding, for me to see the written evidence of it.

Break in the sun till the sun breaks down, And death shall have no dominion.