a) How far do you agree with the above assessment of the collection in "Selected Poems"?

Dylan Thomas's "Selected Poems" offers a wide magnitude of poetry, ranging from poems that are filled with exuberant, elaborate, florid words to poems that offer obscure, mysterious insights into metaphor and imagery. We are bombarded with lots of emotion and dropped into an overwhelming world of Dylan Thomas's language to describe his peculiar thoughts of life from his retrospect.

Thomas uses this device of exuberance to bring his poetry to life, forcing the reader to delve into the depths of his writing, with its connotations of religion and sexual overtones. Thomas's use of the life cycle and the virtues of life mainly show the affluence of exuberance in his poems. This exuberance is conveyed to us by literature, which is impressively powerful and extremely emotionally charged. "Light Breaks Where No Sun Shines" is a particular poem which fits the 'exuberant' label. Thomas chooses to shock you by divulging his sickening thoughts about the birth, life and death process. He strays purposely away from the romantic side of the life cycle, by using words that

File through flesh, where no flesh decks the bones."

the sequence to end, the being is dead an buried in what seems to be an open grave, whilst nature tries to keep the existence alive with glow worms and the dawn light, the being cannot survive symbolising the end of the era.

After studying Dylan Thomas's Selected Poems, I have decided that the statement "His poems are exuberant, often florid and occasionally obscure". Personally I think this is an entirely unfair statement, that doesn't give Thomas's work any justice at all. The word exuberant should be more suitably replaced with enthusiastic. Thomas has an overwhelming thirst for his subject; he is truly enthusiastic about what he is writing about. Through his exuberant phrases he avidly invites reader to view his subject from his viewpoint. Florid also isn't a suitable word to describe Thomas's poetry. Floridness denotes flowery, ornate language, although Thomas's does effectively "dress" language, his wording is not flowery. However, his poetry is extremely obscure in both senses of vagueness and obscurity. By using exuberance and obscurity Dylan Thomas offers a vast insight into a world of literature which has no rules or boundaries, he dares to delve into a deeper meaning of the universe.

"Is my Destroyer" "Turns mine to wax" ""Hauls my shroud sail",

The poet carries on with this theme of life evolving from something that is meant to be dead. The poem doesn't offer any immediate message or moral to learn. This makes the poem very ambiguous there doesn't seem to be any definite relevance to the poem or at least the poem on its own. When you look at when the poem was written we see that it was during Thomas's 'life cycle period' of writing. From this we realise that the poem is in actual fact apart of a larger picture. The poem is involved in one large life cycle evaluation adjoining several poems to describe this cycle, like verses in a song. The cycle starts with "This bread I break" symbolising the beginning, the start of a new day or era. "When once the twilight locks" chronicles the birth of a life in the cycle. "The force that through the green fuse", describes the corruption that we have inflicted on nature and lastly "Light breaks where no sun shines" the last of the poems in the larger scale cycle. This poem brings !

Dylan Thomas's poems mostly have a theme that is exuberant and lively, though his poems posses these qualities some can be a little indistinct in their meanings, and obscure. "Light breaks where no sun shines" offers an obscure outlook into Dylan Thomas's gruesome world of the life cycle. Though mentioned earlier as being exuberant I think this poem is an illustrious example of poetry, which possesses the ability to be both qualities. In the poem we can see both sides of Thomas's reckoning with Exuberant and obscure, we can see the obscure side of the poem by analysing the text in more detail. By close analysis the poet appears to be talking about the dead, relating back to the "no sun shines" part of the title. We discover that Thomas is telling a tale of an awakening. An awakening from beyond the grave, from beyond the realms of normality and what we understand to be natural life. The poem talks about the arousing of a life an entity within a skeleton. The glowworms beco!

Some topics in this essay:
Dylan Thomas's, Green Fuse, Dylan Thomas, Sun Shines, Selected Poems, green fuse, force green fuse, force green, dylan thomas's, sun shines, light breaks sun, breaks sun shines, breaks sun, light breaks, thomas's poems, life cycle, roots trees, blasts roots trees, blasts roots, dylan thomas's poems, Thomas's Selected, Force Green,