‘My Seashaken House on a Breakneck of Rocks’: The Road to Laugharne

Abstract

In the summer of 1947, the Thomas family was treated to a two-month recreational sojourn in Italy, funded by an award of £150 from the Society of Authors (prevailed upon by Edith Sitwell). Aside from a short period on the Ligurian coast at Rapallo, a visit to Rome, and a holiday on the island of Elba, Thomas, Caitlin, and the children spent most of their time at Florence, in a villa in the hills south west of the city.¹ The responses of Mario Luzi, Alessandro Parronchi, and Piero Bigongiari to Thomas’s reading his own and other people’s poetry (including Shakespeare’s and Milton’s), recorded in the last chapter, will have suggested that the poet’s sabbatical in Italy was a successful one, and this was certainly true from the diplomatic point of view. The younger Italian writers and intellectuals that he met welcomed him as the harbinger of a brave new world literature, challenging the conformism and straitened nationalism they had suffered under Fascism. Even his bloody-minded, eccentric behaviour was interpreted generously as a vital incursion into a bleak post-war Florence, still recovering from the bombing and street fighting of recent history. His reputation and his energy inspired the poet Piero Bigongiari, for example, to reconsider the negative tendencies of his recent writing and develop it in more life-affirming directions, finding ‘common ground in the great freedom and density of Thomas’ language’, according to Mario Luzi, ‘they also obviously found encouragement for their own trend, their own doctrine’.²

This day winding down now At God speeded summer’s end In the torrent salmon sun, In my seashaken house On a breakneck of rocks

— Dylan Thomas, ‘Prologue’ to Collected Poems