Dylan Thomas

Today I would like to talk about Dylan Thomas' "Twenty-four Years". After reading just a few of Dylan Thomas' poems, it is clear that he has an obession with death. In the biography that you read before the poems, it states how he enjoyed writing about this darkness with crude and twisted words. His goal was to take an image and undress it, then lay it out for the reader. The moment I read this poem I felt sadness and darkness. I most certainly got the vibe of death and wanted to take it a little further. I did a little more research on this poem and found out that the title was the meaning of his twenty-fourth birthday. It is said that he often did poems to celebrate his birthday but, this was the first one. My question is, why is Dylan Thomas feeling such sadness in a celebratory time. The opening line leads me to think that his life was not so great, "Twenty-four years remind the tears of my eyes." (line 1). It is obvious that as he thinks of the past years up until that point, something is bringing him grief and saddness. There is one line that really stood out to me painting a very grusome and frightening image, "By the light of the meat-eating sun." (line 5). This almost shocked me because when I think of the sun, I think of warm summer days with happiness and laughter. When I read this line by Dylan Thomas, I get this image in my head, almost of a cartoon devil sun. This was probably his goal since he was so intrigued with death. Another line that created a cartoonist image in my head was as follows, "With my red veins full of money," (line 7). The second I got done reading this line, all I imagined was money bills soaring through these red hot veins. The last line brought me to somewhat of a conclustion of what this poem was really about, "I advance for as long as forever is." (line 9). This line gives me the idea that this poem was possibly about him outliving death after twenty-four years. He advanced on to forever. Now this could also mean that he advanced on to heaven making this a fictional poem because as we know he lived past the age of twenty-four, but beings that he followed the Christian ways, it is possible that he was talking about advancing to heaven. As usual I hope this poem is discussed in class so that I can get a better understanding of just what Dylan Thomas was feeling on his birthday.