Dylan Thomas

27 October 1914 – 9 November 1953

From Love Letters

May, 1934

… Soon I see you. Soon I kiss you hullo.
It’s getting cold, too cold to write. I haven’t a vest on, and the wind is blowing around the Bristol Channel. I agree with Buddha that the essence of life is evil. Apart from not being born at all, it is best to die young. I agree with Schopenhauer. (he, in his philosophic dust, would turn with pleasure at my agreement) that life has no pattern & no purpose, but that a twisted vein of evil, like the poison in a drinker’s glass, coils up from the pit to the top of the hemlocked world. Or at least I might do. But some things there are that are better than others. The tiny, scarlet ants that crawl from the holes in the rock onto my busy hand. The shapes of the rocks, carved in chaos by a tiddly sea. The three broken masts, like three nails in the breast of a wooden Messiah, that stick up in the far distance from a stranded ship. The voice of a snotty-nostrilled child sitting in a pool and putting shellfish in her drawers. The hundreds and hundreds of rabbits I saw last night as I lay, incorrigibly romantic, in a field of buttercups & wrote of death. The jawbone of a sheep that I wish would fit into my pocket. The tiny lives that go coldly and liquidly on in the cold pools near my hands. The brown worms in beer. All these like Rupert Brooke I love because they remind me of you. Yes, even the red ants, the dead jawbone, & the hapless chemical. Even the rabbits, buttercups, & nailing masts.

Soon I see you. Write by the end of this week.

Darling, I love you.

XXXX