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.

"These poems, with all their crudities, doubts, and confusions, are written for the love of Man and in praise of God, and I'd be a damn' fool if they weren't."

His father read Shakespeare and others to Thomas before the boy could read for himself.

Words: "what mattered was the sound of them"

On their meanings: "I let, perhaps, an image be 'made' emotionally in me
and then apply to it what intellectual & critical forces I possess—
let it breed another, let that image contradict the first,
make, of the third image bred out of the other two together, a fourth contradictory image,
and let them all, within my imposed formal limits, conflict."

His marriage to Caitlin Macnamara was, in her words, "raw, red bleeding meat", but lasting.

He died, aged 39, of alcoholism, on a tour of readings.

After his death, Caitlin protected his works fiercely

He is memorialized at Westminster Abbey

One drunken night, in great emotional pain, I sat alone reading Thomas' poems aloud.

I discovered the sound of his words having impact beyond the lexical.

Rather than merely recited, as I'd been tought in school,
it gave me the notion of poetry being "sung",
not musically, but uttered from the soul.

A communion - a catharsis