Thomas, Dylan

Autograph manuscript being drafts of the poem "Into your Lying Down head," 11 pages (10 x 8 in.; 254 x 203mm) in ink with 3 ink sketches, Laugharne, Carmarthenshire, Wales, July 1940; minimal wear, central horizontal crease — Autograph manuscript being drafts of "Unluckily for a death" (here titled "Poem"), 14 pages (most approximately 6 x 4 in.; 153 x 102mm) in ink with one ink sketch, Laugharne, Carmarthenshire, Wales, [ca. 1940]; small holes in upper margin of final leaf, affecting one word. 

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Two very revealing working manuscripts of early poems by Dylan Thomas. These drafts show Thomas not only revising imagery and word choice, but also grappling with and working out rhyme schemes and rhythmic structures.

"Into your Lying Down head" was published after further revisions as "Into her Lying Down head" in New Poems, 1940 (1941), an anthology edited by Oscar Williams.  It then appeared in Thomas's New Poems (1943).  The present draft is remarkable for the poet's diagrams of his tentative rhyme scheme.  There are also three small drawing in which Thomas appears to be visualizing his imagery.  For example, a sketch of an island with trees, ink dots representing a sandy beach and two sailboats at sea illustrates the lines "Two sand grains together in bed / Head to heaven-scraping head" (in the published poem "heaven-scraping" becomes "heaven-circling").

The drafts of "Unluckily for a Death," first published in New Poems, are equally revealing.  Thomas completes the beginnings and endings of some stanzas and stalls with the middle, drawing horizontal lines to leave space for the words to come.  Imagery and vocabulary both go through dramatic transformation from early draft to published poem. Thomas begins and ends the poem with a vision of the phoenix. The earliest draft includes the line "Though the phoenix stir in the rocks" underlined and also a small drawing of a phoenix walking upright and a man riding on a whale. The draft begins with a phoenix under a stone and the finished poem with a phoenix "under / The pyre yet to be lighted of my sins and days."  In the final stanza of the published poem, Thomas writes, "Love, my fate got luckily, / Teaches with no telling / That the phoenix' bid for heaven and the desire after / Death in the carved nunnery / Both shall fail if I bow not to your blessing."

These drafts, totaling 25 pages in Dylan Thomas's unmistakable miniscule hand, give an intimate and detailed record of the poet's creative process.