Love and Sex as a Transforming Experience Portrayed in Dylan Thomas’ Select Poetry

Abstract

Dylan thomas deals love in par with death and creation. His poetry deals with love and sex to be the part of the life’s journey towards death and rebirth. One can often find love in his poetry to be sensual driving to extreme insanity. He views love and sex to be a part of procreation and life’s journey towards grave. He finds the universe sexual as the process of unity in the universe of human life with life process of nature. To deny sex is to go against the universal scheme of creative process. Sexual commitment is urged by the senses but feared to be expressed.  Sex is for rebirth and renewal of children who are the bond of human love. A profound need of love is felt in human life but it is unattended due to fear. This fear in thomas is due to his puritanical upbringing as well as the conventional ideas of the society against which he had so often fretted and protested in his poems and letters.

The early poems constitute physical and compulsive love with impersonal tone. There is a flow of conscious desire in thomas to transcend sheer animality in his 1930 notebook. He had described sexual love attended by the fear of death which is the ultimate reality. He describes love as elevating soul, ecstasy of social union, positive power of love that adds meaning and creates pleasant feeling in life. Thomas dealt love not only in connection with sex but also his affection for his aunt in after the funeral, filial love in if my head hurt a hair’s foot, his love for his dying father in do not go gentle into that good night, impersonal affair in marriage love poems and christ’s sacrificial and redemptive power of love in many of his poems. The end of love is not an asylum or plague or it is not mere rub but it is the way of spiritualising soul in and death shall have no dominion through the line, “though lovers be lost, love shall not”.