I’ve just come back from holiday a time of pottering around, walking, reading and just generally relaxing in the sunshine. I bought a book Collected poems 1934-1952 by Dylan Thomas. I’m not one to try to interpret Thomas’ poems as they can be quite obscure, intricate, and difficult. However, one poem spoke to me and so here’s my personal reflection on the poem. I think I can get away with a personal interpretation as literary and poetry is not an exact science, I guess that’s what attracts me to it. So here’s the first two stanzas.
The force that through the green fuse drives the flower
Drives my green age; that blasts the roots of trees
Is my destroyer.
And I am dumb to tell the crooked rose
My youth is bent by the same wintry fever.
The force that drives the water through the rocks
Drives my red blood; that drives the mouthing streams
Turns to mine to wax.
And I am dumb to mouth unto my veins.
How at the mountain spring the same mouth sucks.
Firstly, it speaks of nature how through watching, and experiencing it, we can understand more deeply who we are. When reading the first stanza I could relate to this idea of a ‘green fuse.’ A green shoot is full of potential, if cultivated can grow into a wonderful flower. It is saturated with matter that is ready to explode into life but it needs time to grow, to cultivate, to be tended to, given room to expand. All of this takes time, patience, energy, and committment. If not tended to properly it can destroy. Lots to learn there about my own life and the lives of others.
Secondly, I like how the poem forces you to take time over it to read the words again to feel the twists and turns. Then each stanza the reader is found ‘dumb’ unable to converse to creation it’s almost as if nature speaks and we are there to listen. In a world that expects us to perform here we find ourselves silenced at the wonder of the natural world.
Thirdly, although there is no mention of ‘God’ by name there is a sense of the wonder of creation that speaks of the wonder of the almighty. The life within the green fuse, the force within nature, the spring of water, finds its origin in the Triune God who is wonderfully creative and powerful. We find ourselves ‘dumb’ when we come near. It takes time to read the poem, to experience the poem, to walk within nature and take in the reality of the words. So with God it take time, not to be rushed, not to be forced, but to be patient, listening, watching, waiting, and being. Perhaps that’s why Jesus went up mountains to pray taking time away from performance, time to listen, time to be, and time to experience the awesomeness of the Father.
