Thursday 4 March 2010

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."

From the first paragraph of the poem by Dylan Thomas. Surely a poetic expression of a basic unalienable truth, the common ancestry of all life. When I feel the need to indulge the spiritual side of my nature I turn to works such as this. Of course much of the King James's version of the Bible is superbly poetic and can be enjoyed as such but where is truth to be found in its preposterous subject matter?

1 comment:

  1. Thanks for the Dylan Thomas, I really like the feeling of life/nature in this poem. He seems to touch the raw nerve. Apparently his mother was deeply religious yet his father was not. And I think he leant more towards his mother's feelings. However, I really like the way you put it "Surely a poetic expression of a basic unalienable truth, the common ancestry of all life."
    I don't believe in the supernatural or the "proposterous subject matter" propagated by the proponents of religion either; these things have been invented and perpetuated over the centuries by the human species.
    PB Shelley, Wordsworth and some of the other English romantic poets also expose those nerves very well; as with Kahil Gibran.

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