Treatment of Childhood in the ‘Poem in October’

Dylan Thomas has special fascination for childhood. He has written a number of poems on childhood and ‘Poem in October’ is one of them. Dylan resembles Wordsworth and William Blake in his attitude to childhood. Wordsworth sees a child from a distance and laments the fact that he can no longer see the heavenly radiance around the objects of nature as he had seen in his childhood. But Dylan like Blake becomes a child himself through imagination and can see and enjoy the beauty of nature through the eyes of a child.

The lyric ‘Poem in October’, written to celebrate the thirtieth birthday of the poet, is an attempt to recollect the sweet memories, innocence and glorious vision of childhood. Waking up at the call of nature quite early in the morning, he feels that he is being greeted on his birthday by the objects of nature, birds, beasts, hill and trees and the waves of the ocean. When the whole town is in sleep the poet comes out of the house and finds the pool full of mussels, the herons sitting priest like on the seashore, the rising waves of the ocean, call of seagulls flying over the shore, the crowing of rooks from the woods, the knocks of the sailing boats and the fishermen hunting fish in the harbor with nets. All these natural phenomena and human activities seem to welcome the poet on his birthday.

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It is a rainy autumn day is the month of October and it seems to the poet, who has become a schizoid child, that the waterbirds and the birds flying over the trees are aware of his birthday and seem to be celebrating the occasion by flying over the farm houses and the white colored horses, proclaiming his name.

He remembers the happy days which he passed in Fern Hill, where was situated the farm of his aunt. It was a country noted for its apples, pears and currants and the boy Dylan walked like a lord there. He remembers his happy days at Swansea, his native land, where he used to walk by the side of his mother in the morning. Then the sunlight and the woods seemed to him glorious and holy.

But the glorious visions and wonders of childhood first he lived through and now remembered, cannot hold the poet for a long time. He returns to reality form his fantasy-world. The griefs and sorrows of childhood makes his suffer once again as he recollects them. This makes boy and poet, past and present, Laughorne and Swansea, one.

The poet’s nostalgia for a vanished glorious past soon ends and he returns to the present. Thus he is able to regain some measure of self control and face the reality of the moment, that he is no longer a boy but a man of thirty. So the poet now offers a prayer that in future he may continue to write on the delights and wonders of a child.