10 of the Best Dylan Thomas Poems Everyone Should Read

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)

The Welsh poet Dylan Thomas (1914-53) was a fascinating man and poet, and his poetry remains much-loved and widely read around the world. But which are his very best poems? In this post, we’ve endeavoured to choose Dylan Thomas’s ten finest poems which we think everyone should read.

His unusual first name was taken from a character in the Welsh collection of myths, the Mabinogion; in turn, the musician Robert Zimmerman would adopt the name ‘Bob Dylan’ in honour of Thomas.

But Dylan Thomas has his detractors. Some critics have dismissed his poetry as the triumph of sound over sense (a charge also levelled at an earlier poet like Swinburne), but in fact Thomas’s poetry is charged with meaning, albeit of an often elusive sort. In many ways, he’s the most significant poet of 1940s Britain, although he was to find an even more appreciative audience in the United States.

‘Charged’ is a good word for Thomas’s poetry, too: his lines positively pulsate with unusual visceral images. These are some of his very best. Follow the title of each poem to read it

1. ‘Fern Hill’.

In this, one of Thomas’s best-loved poems, he revisits his childhood, using his visits to his aunt’s farm as the subject-matter. It was written in 1945, just after the end of WWII. ‘Fern Hill’ contains some of the most arresting images in all of Thomas’s poetry (and he was a master of the arresting image!). Look at the ‘fire green as grass’, for instance.

2. ‘Light Breaks Where No Sun Shines‘.

This was Thomas’s breakthrough poem, published in The Listener in March 1934 when Thomas was only nineteen years old. Such was its immediate impact that it attracted the admiring attention of T. S. Eliot, as well as numerous complaints for its ‘obscenity’.

The poem’s imagery is obscure and ambiguous, but it’s possible that Thomas is describing the act of conception in highly charged terms, though only very obliquely (although ‘candle in the thighs’ is perhaps a more obvious hint at the poem’s sexual subject-matter).

3. ‘The Force That Through the Green Fuse Drives the Flower’.

Another early poem, written in 1933 when Thomas was still a teenager, this lyric considers the ‘force’ of time that dominates all living things, including the poet himself. Time brings new life to bear and is responsible for the poet’s own ‘green age’ (i.e., his youth), but this same phenomenon, time, will also destroy both the flower and the mortal poet.

The poem might be regarded as a companion piece to the next poem on this list, which offers a very different perspective …

4. ‘And Death Shall Have No Dominion’.

Another classic poem written in 1933 while Thomas was still a teenager, and in response to a challenge issued by a friend, ‘And Death Shall Have No Dominion’, as its title suggests, is a poem about immortality. Rather than viewing death as a destructive force, in this poem Thomas focuses on death’s ability to cleanse and restore: the madman becomes sane through death, and every person is brought together with every other person through dying.

Like Percy Shelley’s ‘Ozymandias’, the poem was the result of a competition between two friends: Bert Trick was an amateur poet whose day job was a grocer, and it was Trick who suggested that they both have a go at writing a poem on the theme of immortality. Both poems were published.

5. ‘A Refusal to Mourn the Death, by Fire, of a Child in London’.

Written during WWII when London was frequently being bombed by the Germans, this poem – as its title makes clear – rejects the usual response to death, especially the death of a young girl.

What sounds like a heartless premise is anything but: Thomas’s argument in the poem is that it is odd and inappropriate to mourn one particular death (especially when ‘mourning’ in itself does no good) when there is so much suffering in the world, and always has been.

Here the references to Jewish symbols such as the ‘synagogue’ and ‘Zion’ suggest not only Old Testament suffering but, indeed, the suffering of the millions of Jewish people who had been, and were still being, killed in the Holocaust. (News of the atrocities was just beginning to reach London when Thomas wrote the poem.)

6. ‘In My Craft or Sullen Art’.

This short 1946 poem is perhaps the closest Dylan Thomas came to offering a manifesto for his own poetry: in two brief stanzas, he argues that he writes not for money or for praise, but for the consolation of lovers, their ‘arms / Round the griefs of the ages’, who will read his work.

Tellingly, he acknowledges in the poem’s final line that his ideal readers are those who do not ‘heed’ his ‘craft or art’: he writes for ordinary people who have been in love, not people who necessarily study or appreciate poetry beyond that powerful emotional connection it can create between poet and reader.

7. ‘The Hand That Signed the Paper’.

This poem from 1936 was written at a time when W. H. Auden was writing some of his most powerful political poetry; Thomas may not have shared much else with Auden, but this poem, about the power wielded by a political leader who is able to wreak destruction simply by signing a document, is close to Auden’s focus on the bureaucratic side of modern warfare, where the people who cause wars are often far removed from the death and destruction they are responsible for.

8. ‘Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night’.

One of Dylan Thomas’s best-loved poems, ‘Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night’ is a villanelle, a poem divided into three-line stanzas where the same two repeated lines of verse comprise the last line of each alternating stanza. This poetic form enables Thomas to use the title within the poem as both an instruction (or request) and a simple indicative statement.

A number of Dylan Thomas’s poems offer a sinewy, unsentimental approach to death, but Thomas’s own demise would follow not long after he composed these defiant words for his father, so the poem might also, oddly, be analysed as autobiographical, in a quasi-prophetic sort of way.

Written about the death of Thomas’s own father, the poem was completed not long before Dylan himself would die, aged just 39, in 1953. We discuss the poem in more detail here.

9. ‘Poem on His Birthday’.

Few ‘birthday poems’ have taken the concept quite so literally as Dylan Thomas. In this longer poem, Thomas returns literally to his origins or birth, reimagining the womblike oceanic forces which gave rise to him. Written when Thomas was in his mid-thirties (‘driftwood thirty-fifth wind turned age’), it’s a meditation on getting older as much as it is about being born.

10. ‘Poem in October’.

Another birthday poem, ‘Poem in October’ was written in 1944 when Thomas turned 30. The poem celebrates his walks in Laugharne, a small Welsh town where Thomas and his wife settled following their marriage in 1937.

If you enjoyed this pick of the finest Dylan Thomas poems, check out more great poetry with the best poems by Gerard Manley Hopkins.