This week’s choice is Dylan Thomas’s “The force that through the green fuse drives the flower”—one of the poems that made his name as a teenager.
The lips of time leech to the fountain head;
Dylan Thomas (1914—1953)
Love drips and gathers, but the fallen blood
Shall calm her sores.
And I am dumb to tell a weather’s wind
How time has ticked a heaven round the stars.
Poem 315. “The force that through the green fuse drives the flower”
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 dries the mouthing streams
Turns mine to wax.
And I am dumb to mouth unto my veins
How at the mountain spring the same mouth sucks.
The hand that whirls the water in the pool
Stirs the quicksand; that ropes the blowing wind
Hauls my shroud sail.
And I am dumb to tell the hanging man
How of my clay is made the hangman’s lime.
The lips of time leech to the fountain head;
Love drips and gathers, but the fallen blood
Shall calm her sores.
And I am dumb to tell a weather’s wind
How time has ticked a heaven round the stars.
And I am dumb to tell the lover’s tomb
How at my sheet goes the same crooked worm.
This poem shows us the power of time. The “force that through the green fuse drives the flower” and the “wintry fever” that bends the rose are the same natural process that drives life and death: time. Thomas uses forceful metaphors in this poem to emphasise that time drives the power of nature and the inevitability of dissolution.
Time drives the stems of flowers through the “fuse”—the turf—which he likens to youthful energy “my green age,” but goes on to show the other side of the coin: time ultimately “blasts the roots of trees” and will destroy him as casually as he was created. The rose is bent by the same force that saps his youth, and there is no bargaining with this elemental force.
The second stanza speaks of the streams that course through the rocks of the Welsh mountains, cutting through the landscape as time wears on just as the blood in the body pulses, although in time, the streams will run dry and the blood will cease to pump and just like the rose, the blood of his body and the water of the mountain springs are the instruments of an indifferent fate and flow or halt as time goes on.
The third stanza shows time as the hand that swirls water and the force that turns quicksand as it sucks down some unfortunate victim; time drives “the blowing wind” as much as it dictates the moment when our “shroud sail” is raised and we die. There is no communication with this inevitability: although the “hangman’s lime”—the quicklime traditionally used in disposal of corpses—and the clay of our substance are one and the same, this is immaterial to the course of time.
The fourth stanza is rather obscure and seems to show time as a leech feeding itself vampirically from love’s spring, scattering and pooling blood that can salve the wounds left by this parasite. The wind rises and falls at time’s behest, and even heaven has been constructed amongst the stars as time has passed.
The final couplet returns to the personal and we see that lovers eventually meet their end and are interred, and even the living may feel the presence of the “same crooked worm” as they confront their mortality.
I discovered this poem, like so many others, through a tape of Richard Burton reading poetry. It has always struck me as an immensely imaginative work, with strong metaphors and imagery that sticks in the mind. The recording is available on YouTube as are so many of Burton’s poetry performances; I also found a recording of Thomas himself performing the poem.