Flag of Wales
On this day in 1953, poet and writer, Dylan Thomas, died in New York City at the age of 39. Born Dylan Marlais Thomas on 27 October 1914 in Swansea, South Wales. One of my favorite poets. I particularly like the villanelle for his dying father, Do not go gentle into that good night and the poem And Death Shall Have No Dominion. Thomas met the dancer Caitlin MacNamara in the Wheatsheaf pub in London’s West End. They were married on 11 July 1937 in Cornwall. I am certainly proud of my own Welsh heritage. Cymru am byth! Wales forever! 
The Final Footprint – Thomas is interred in Saint Martin’s Churchyard in Laugharne, Wales. His grave is marked by a white cross. There is a statue of Thomas in Swansea and a memorial. The memorial is a small rock in an enclosed garden in Cwmdonkin Park. The rock is inscribed with the closing lines from his poem Fern Hill;
Oh as I was young and easy in the mercy of his means
Time held me green and dying
Though I sang in my chains like the sea.
Thomas’s home in Laugharne, the Boat House, has been made a memorial. A plaque was placed in Westminster Abbey’s Poets Corner in honour of Thomas. His image appears on the pub sign of Brown’s Hotel in Laugharne. From And death shall have no dominion:
And death shall have no dominion.
Dead men naked they shall be one
With the man in the wind and the west moon;
When their bones are picked clean and the clean bones gone,
They shall have stars at elbow and foot;
Though they go mad they shall be sane,
Though they sink through the sea they shall rise again
Though lovers be lost love shall not;
And death shall have no dominion.
Have you planned yours yet?
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