Today, dear reader, we hoist one high for a true heavyweight of the written word, the Welch wizard of verse, Dylan Thomas.  Born on this day in 1914, he took what can too often be the mundane art of poetry, wrestled it into submission, drank with it, and then bellowed it from the rooftops.  He was a force of nature whose voice was, as he put it, “loud as a sea-gull.”

If you spent any time in undergrad poetry class, you know you can’t talk about Dylan Thomas without talking about the sheer, untamable power of his language.  His was poetry with its sleeves rolled up, ready for a fight or a passionate fuck.

You know the hits.  Even if you think you don’t, you do.  “Do not go gentle into that good night,” was him…the definitive war cry against the dying of the light.  It’s a poem written for his dying father, but it’s a defiant roar for all of us.  He’s telling us that we should face the end not with a whimper, but with the full-throated rage of a life fiercely lived.  Old age, he tells us, should “burn and rave at the close of day.”  Goddamn right.

And there was the flip side of the coin: “Fern Hill.”  There, Thomas was raging…he was remembering childhood, when he was “young and easy under apple boughs.”   That poem’s final lines, realizing that time had him “dying” even as he “sang in my chains like the sea,” are a liver kick of heartbreaking truth.

Of course, the legend of Dylan Thomas is as much about the living as it is about the writing.  His life was a whirlwind tour of pubs, lecture halls, and bedrooms on both sides of the Atlantic.  He lived with the same ferocity with which he wrote, a trait that would ultimately lead to his final, tragic curtain call.

In November 1953, the tour ended at the Chelsea Hotel in New York City, that infamous sanctuary for artists and misfits.  After a long night at the White Horse Tavern, he returned to his room, and the world lost one of its most unique voices.  The story goes he downed eighteen (18) straight whiskies.  He raged, and then the light went out.

So today, on his birthday, let’s celebrate the whole man.  The genius who gave us words that soar and the flawed human who lived without a safety net.

N.P.: “223” – Rok Nardin, Frank William