Dylan Thomas - Author's Prologue lyrics

rate me

This day winding down now

At God speeded summer's end

In the torrent salmon sun,

In my seashaken house

On a breakneck of rocks

Tangled with chirrup and fruit,

Froth, flute, fin, and quill

At a wood's dancing hoof,

By scummed, starfish sands

With their fishwife cross

Gulls, pipers, cockles, and snails,

Out there, crow black, men

Tackled with clouds, who kneel

To the sunset nets,

Geese nearly in heaven, boys

Stabbing, and herons, and shells

That speak seven seas,

Eternal waters away

From the cities of nine

Days' night whose towers will catch

In the religious wind

Like stalks of tall, dry straw,

At poor peace I sing

To you strangers (though song

Is a burning and crested act,

The fire of birds in

The world's turning wood,

For my swan, splay sounds),

Out of these seathumbed leaves

That will fly and fall

Like leaves of trees and as soon

Crumble and undie

Into the dogdayed night.

Seaward the salmon, sucked sun slips,

And the dumb swans drub blue

My dabbed bay's dusk, as I hack

This rumpus of shapes

For you to know

How I, a spining man,

Glory also this star, bird

Roared, sea born, man torn, blood blest.

Hark: I trumpet the place,

From fish to jumping hill! Look:

I build my bellowing ark

To the best of my love

As the flood begins,

Out of the fountainhead

Of fear, rage read, manalive,

Molten and mountainous to stream

Over the wound asleep

Sheep white hollow farms

To Wales in my arms.

Hoo, there, in castle keep,

You king singsong owls, who moonbeam

The flickering runs and dive

The dingle furred deer dead!

Huloo, on plumbed bryns,

O my ruffled ring dove

In the hooting, nearly dark

With Welsh and reverent rook,

Coo rooning the woods' praise,

Who moons her blue notes from her nest

Down to the curlew herd!

Ho, hullaballoing clan

Agape, with woe

In your beaks, on the gabbing capes!

Heigh, on horseback hill, jack

Whisking hare! who

Hears, there, this fox light, my flood ship's

Clangour as I hew and smite

(A clash of anvils for my

Hubbub and fiddle, this tune

On atounged puffball)

But animals thick as theives

On God's rough tumbling grounds

(Hail to His beasthood! ).

Beasts who sleep good and thin,

Hist, in hogback woods! The haystacked

Hollow farms ina throng

Of waters cluck and cling,

And barnroofs cockcrow war!

O kingdom of neighbors finned

Felled and quilled, flash to my patch

Work ark and the moonshine

Drinking Noah of the bay,

With pelt, and scale, and fleece:

Only the drowned deep bells

Of sheep and churches noise

Poor peace as the sun sets

And dark shoals every holy field.

We will ride out alone then,

Under the stars of Wales,

Cry, Multiudes of arks! Across

The water lidded lands,

Manned with their loves they'll move

Like wooden islands, hill to hill.

Huloo, my prowed dove with a flute!

Ahoy, old, sea-legged fox,

Tom tit and Dai mouse!

My ark sings in the sun

At God speeded summer's end

And the flood flowers now.