'In the flocked leaves in the dew dipped year ... '
After an extremely busy day, in what is shaping up to be a foolishly busy week, I feel the need of something familiar and soothing - and so it is that I turn to a poem I first encountered not via university, or poetry reviews, or anthologies - but in the pages of Roald Dahl's novel for children, Matilda. For those of you unfamiliar with this seminal work, allow me to explain. When Matilda accompanies her teacher, the splendidly named Miss Honey, home for tea, she discovers that Miss Honey lives in a tiny cottage buried deep in the woods. They pause at the garden gate, and Miss Honey tells her that "A poet called Dylan Thomas once wrote some lines that I think of every time I walk up this path," before reciting the glorious opening stanza of Dylan Thomas's 'In Country Sleep'.
I think I must have read this when I was nine or so, and I was mesmerised by it. When I discovered that the lines in the book were just a fragment of the poem, I was thrilled, but I never fell in love with the rest of it in quite the way I did with the first stanza - which is, to quote Matilda, "like music". From here I went on to develop a teenage obsession with Under Milk Wood and a healthy appreciation of the rest Thomas' work. His poems are all heavily copyrighted, so here's the marvellous opening, and a link to read the rest of it somewhere more official.
In Country Sleep by Dylan Thomas
Never and never, my girl riding far and near In the land of the hearthstone tales, and spelled asleep, Fear or believe that the wolf in a sheepwhite hood Loping and bleating roughly and blithely shall leap, My dear, my dear, Out of a lair in the flocked leaves in the dew dipped year To eat your heart in the house in the rosy wood.
