Jeds blog

Biography
Dylan Thomas was born in Wales, 1914. He was a neurotic, sickly child who always preferred to read on his own. He excelled in English, so this made him neglect other subjects, then he dropped out of school when he was sixteen years old. He published his first book when he was twenty and it was a great success. It was called Eighteen poems. Thomas was not concerned with social and intellectual issues, and his writing had intense lyricism and charged emotion, which was more like Romantic tradition. He visited America in the year 1950. He was flamboyantly theatrical and read his poems with deep feeling. He was also an alcoholic, and engaged in roaring disputes in public. He became a legendary figure, both for his work and his excitement in life. Sadly, he died from alcoholism when he turned 35, due to a long drinking bout in New York City in 1953.

My Hero Bares His Nerves
By Dylan Thomas

My hero bares his nerves along my wrist

That rules from wrist to shoulder,

Unpacks the head that, like a sleepy ghost,

Leans on my mortal ruler,

The proud spine spurning turn and twist.

And these poor nerves so wired to the skull

Ache on the lovelorn paper

I hug to love with my unruly scrawl

That utters all love hunger

And tells the page the empty ill.

My hero bares my side and sees his heart

Tread, like a naked Venus,

The beach of flesh, and wind her bloodred plait;

Stripping my loin of promise,

He promises a secret heat.

He holds the wire from the box of nerves

Praising the mortal error

Of birth and death, the two sad knaves of thieves,

And the hunger’s emperor;

He pulls the chain, the cistern moves.

Analyze
This poem if full of emotion and has a lot of imagery in it. Metaphors, similes and personification are also used in this poem. There were also some signs of repetition, which enhanced the poems magnitude, such as ‘My hero bares’. There was also a rhyming pattern. For example ‘Praising the mortal error, of birth and death, the two sad knaves of thieves, and the hungers emperor.’ The underlined phrase also shows personification, which is a form of figurative language. Metaphors are also used. For example, ‘ unpacks the head that, like a sleepy ghost’, the head is compared to a sleepy ghost. On the all, I think the style of this poem is great, because it has a sort of sad feeling to it, and I usually write sad poems, or do I?

Filed under: Poetry