The Notebook Poems

Dylan Thomas began the first of his existing notebooks at the age of fifteen whilst living at 5 Cwmdonkin Drive, Swansea. They continued until he was nineteen, and stopped as he began to select poems from them for his first collection, 18 Poems, which was published in 1934. Poems from the notebooks also formed the basis of Twenty Five Poems (1936) and contributed to The Map of Love (1939) and Deaths and Entrances (1946).

These are the titles of all the poems published in The Notebook Poems. First lines are given when the poem is untitled.

Juvenilia from Manuscripts:

• The Mishap
• The Maniac
• Song to a Child at Night-Time
• You hold the ilex by its stem

Verse from Swansea Grammar School Magazine:

• A Ballad of Salad
• Request to an Obliging Poet
• In Borrowed Plumes
• The Sincerest Form of Flattery
• The Callous Stars
• Two Decorations

Poems from the story, ‘The Fight’

• Frivolous is my hate
• Warp
• The Grass Blade’s Psalm
• One has found a delicate power
• The shepherd blew upon his reed
• The Shepherd to his Lass
• The rod can lift its twining head

1930 Notebook:

• Osiris, Come to Isis
• The lion-fruit goes from my thumb
• Poem Written on the Death of a Very Dear Illusion
• You shall not despair
• My vitality overwhelms you
• And so the New Love Came
• On Watching Goldfish
• The lion, lapping the water
• I Am Aware
• My river, even though it lifts
• The corn blows from side to side lightly
• We will be conscious of our sanctity
• I have come to catch your voice
• My love is deep night
• When your furious motion is steadied,
• No thought can trouble my unwholesome pose
• The hill or sea and sky is carried
• So I sink myself in the moment
• No, pigeon, I’m too wise
• The cavern shelters me from harm
• Woman on Tapestry
• Pillar breaks, and mask is cleft
• It’s light that makes the intervals
• Let me escape
• Oh, dear, angelic time – go on
• And the ghost rose up to interrogate
• When I allow myself to fly
• Admit the Sun
• A Section of a Poem called ‘Hassan’s Journey into the World’
• I know this vicious minute’s hour
• Claudetta, You, and Me
• Come, black-tressed Claudetta, home
• Cool, oh no cool
• They brought you mandolins
• The air you breathe encroaches
• When all your tunes have caused
• Written in a classroom
• Hand in hand Orpheus
• I, poor romantic, held her heel
• Oh! the children run towards the door
• Tether the first thought, if you will
• How shall the animal

1930-32 Notebook

• This love – perhaps I overrate it
• Today, this hour I breathe
• Sometimes the sky’s too bright
• Here is the bright green sea,
• My golden bird, the sun
• Live in my living
• Rain cuts the place we tread
• The morning, space for Leda
• The spire cranes; its statue
• Cool may she find the day
• Yesterday, the cherry sun
• Time enough to rot
• Conceive these images in air
• You be my hermaphrodite in logic
• Until the light is less
• The neophyte, baptized in smiles
• To be encompassed by the brilliant earth
• Who is to mar
• The natural day and night
• Although through my bewildered way
• High on a hill
• Refract the lady, drown the profiteer
• Into be home from home
• If the lady from the casino
• Through sober to the truth when
• It is the wrong, the hurt, the mineral
• Even the voice will not last
• True love’s inflated; from a truthful shape
• Since, on a quiet night, I heard them talk
• They are the only dead who did not love
• Have hold on my heart utterly
• The caterpillar is with child
• Foot, head, or traces
• Or be my paramour or die
• The womb and the woman’s grave
• Let Sheba bear a love for Solomon
• There was one world and there is another
• For us there cannot be a welcome
• An end to substance in decay’s a sequence
• Why is the blood red and the grass green
• Have cheated constancy
• There’s plenty in the world that doth not die
• This time took has much
• Which of you put out his rising
• Written for a Personal Epitaph
• When you have ground such beauty down to dust
• Sever from what I trust
• Never to reach the oblivious dark
• Introductory poem
• Take up this seed, it is most beautiful
• There in her tears were laughter and tears again
• How can the knotted root
• Children of darkness got no wings
• It’s not in misery but in oblivion
• What lunatic’s whored after shadow
• Here is a fact for my teeth
• Any matter move it to conclusion
• Too long, skeleton, death’s risen
• No man knows loveliness at all
• Do thou heed me, cinnamon smelling
• They said, tired of trafficking
• Be silent let who will
• Being but men, we walked into the trees
• The hunchback in the park
• Out of the sighs a love comes
• At last, in hail and rain
• Upon your held-out hand
• Nearly summer, and the devil
• Pome
• Were that enough, enough to ease the pain

Typescript poems:

• Walking in gardens by the sides
• Now the thirst parches lip and tongue
• Lift up your face, light
• Let it be known that little live but lies
• The midnight road, though young man tread unknowing
• With windmills turning wrong directions
• The gossipers have lowered their voices
• Especially when the November wind

February 1933 Notebook:

• Sweet as the comets’ kiss night sealed
• It is death though I have died
• Had she not loved me at the beginning
• Before the gas fades with a harsh last bubble
• Hold on, whatever slips beyond the edge
• After the funeral, mule praises, brays
• We who were young are old. It is the oldest cry
• To take to give is all, return what given
• No faith to fix the teeth on carries
• Out of a war of wits, when folly of words
• In wasting one drop from the heart’s honey cells
• With all the fever of the August months
• Their faces shone under some radiance
• See, on gravel paths under the harpstrung trees
• Make me a mask to shut from razor glances
• To follow the fox at the hounds’ tails
• The ploughman’s gone, the hansom driver
• Light, I know, treads the ten million stars
• My body knows it wants that, often high
• And death shall have no dominion
• Within his head revolved a little world
• Not from this anger, anticlimax after
• The first ten years in school and park
• Pass through twelve stages, reach the fifth
• First there was the lamb on knocking knees
• We lying by seasand watching yellow
• Before We Sinned
• Now understand a state of being, heaven
• Interrogating smile has spoken death
• No man believes, when a star falls shot
• When I lie in my bed and the moon lies in hers
• The tombstone tells how she died
• Why east wind chills and south wind cools
• This is remembered when the hairs drop out
• In me ten paradoxes make one truth
• A woman wails her dead among the trees
• Praise to the architects
• Here in this spring, stars float along the void
• A praise of acid or a chemist’s lotion
• Too many times my same sick cry
• We have the fairy tales by heart
• Find meat on bones that soon have none
• Ears in the turrets hear
• The woman speaks:
• Let the brain bear the hammering
• The minute is a prisoner in the hour
• Shall gods be said to thump the cloud
• Matthias spat upon the lord
• August 1933 Notebook
• The hand that signed the paper felled a city
• Let for one moment a faith statement
• You are the ruler of this realm of flesh
• That the sum saintly might add to nought
• Grief, thief of time, crawls off
• Shiloh’s seed shall not be sown
• Before I knocked and flesh let enter
• We see rise the secret wind behind the brain
• Take the needles and the knives
• Not forever shall the lord of the red hail
• Before we mothernaked fall
• The sun burns the morning, a bush in the brain
• My hero bares his nerves along my wrist
• In the beginning was the three-pointed star
• Love me, not as the dreamy nurses
• For loss of blood I fell where stony hills
• Jack, my father, let the knaves
• The girl, unlacing, trusts her breast
• Through these lashed rings set deep inside their hollows
• Ape and ass both spit me forth
• The eye of sleep turned on me like a moon
• The force that through the green fuse drives the flower
• From love’s first fever to her plague, from the soft second
• The almanac of time hangs in the brain
• And from the first declension of the flesh
• All that I owe the fellows of the grave
• Here lie the beasts of man and here I feast
• When once the twilight locks no longer
• Light breaks where no sun shines
• I fellowed sleep who kissed between the brains
• See, says the lime, my wicked milks
• This bread I break was once the oak
• Your pain shall be music in your string
• A process in the weather of the heart
• Foster the light, nor veil the bushy sun
• The shades of girls all flavoured from their shrouds
• In this our age the gunman and his moll
• Which is the world? Of my two sleepings, which
• Where once the waters of your face
• I see the boys of summer in their ruin
• In the beginning was the three-pointed star
• If I was tickled by the rub of love

Collateral Poems

• I have not moulded this marble
• Calling temerity to see
• You too have seen the sun a bird of fire
• That sanity be kept
• That the sum sanity might add to nought
• Do you not father me, nor the erected arm
• Foster the light, nor veil the feeling moon
• First I knew the lamb on knocking knees
• You breath was shed