JOIN USNever before have I scoured a graveyard so sedulously. Walking in the shadow of ancient yews. Squinting to read the cemetery map nailed by the iron gate. Reading epitaphs.
Gaping at flowers left on cold tombstones. In the graveyard, I was looking for a man who had walked gently into the night. A young man. Barely 39 when he gasped for that last breath after a round of '18 whiskies' in a New York pub. The bells of St Martin's Church in Laugharne (Dyfed, Wales) were ringing sonorously at the hour as I trudged through the wet grass looking for a 'grave marked with a simple wooden cross'.
Home & grave
I was rooting through the graveyard for a poet. A Welsh poet called Dylan Marlais Thomas (1914-1953). The one who lived in a quaint boathouse by the river, wrote in a garage on a cliff and spent evenings in the bar of Brown’s Hotel, talking and getting tipsy. Laugharne was Thomas’s home for a few years and his graveyard forever.
The Laugharne cemetery is crowded. Many dead live here. In the middle, there’s a freshly painted white wooden cross that has Thomas’s name on one side and of his wife Caitlin Macnamara on the other. They are buried next to each other. In this tiny Welsh town, Thomas walked on his 30th birthday (October 27, 1944) and wrote the famous Poem in October in which there’s the sound of the estuary and the herons awaiting the tide in the ‘beguiling island of a town’:
It was my thirtieth year to heaven
Woke to my hearing from harbour and neighbour wood
And the mussel pooled and the heron
Priested shore
The morning beckon
The Welsh town was frigid, the waves thrashing and the chill cutting through the bones. It was not October, but I had to retrace the footsteps of Thomas, do the two-mile walk that the poet had walked on his birthday.
On his first visit to Laugharne, Thomas thought of it as 'the strangest town in Wales'. But the poet kept coming back, making it immortal in his radio play Under the Milkwood. In the play, Thomas disguised Laugharne as Llareggub ('bugger all' spelled backwards) where lived strange characters. I hop to the recently refurbished Brown’s Hotel which has memories of Thomas framed in stunning black & white photographs on the walls.
The bar spills with his stories and in the Pelican across the street where Thomas chatted with his father and both worked on the crossword. When his father lay frail and dying, Thomas wrote the famous Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night. It was in the Pelican that Thomas’s body was laid out when he died in 1953. The boathouse where Thomas lived and wrote is now a museum, a pilgrimage for all poetry lovers.
In Wales, Dylan Thomas was not the only one I was seeking. I was heading to the abbey where in 1798, William Wordsworth wrote the eponymous poem a few miles above Tintern Abbey:
These waters, rolling from their
mountain - springs
With a soft inland murmur. Once again,
do I behold these steep and lofty cliff
It was in the 400-year-old abbey that Lord Alfred Tennyson scribbled Tears, Idle Tears and painter J M W Turner used watercolours for his 1795 painting, Tintern Abbey: The Transept.
Built in 1131 on River Wye, Tintern Abbey was the second Cistercian foundation in Britain and the first in Wales — the monks wore black, tilled the land, brew ale and took a vow of extreme austerity. The Gothic abbey was built over 400 years (1131 to 1536) and was abandoned in 1536.
For years it lay silent, oblivious of its own past and of the Tintern village that was a commercial highway in Middle Ages carrying coal, wood, charcoal, iron ore and stone. It was in this village that the wire for the first transatlantic cable was produced in the 19th century, and not too far from Tintern was born Bertrand Russell, the famous British philosopher and political activist.
A dull picture
Today, Tintern Abbey is in ruins. Naked shell. Huge, but skeletal, standing lonely in the burnished orange of the autumn hues. Stumps of pillars peeping out of wet grass where lay brothers who once grew corn. A fallen wall looking desolate. The main entrance door is shut. I walk in through the sidewalk expecting centuries of silence. I always believed ruins never spoke. They stood speechless stoically.
Their stories stacked in cracked columns, weeping walls; their yesterdays hidden under layers of grime; their glory forgotten in neglect. I step into the kitchen where the monks ate in silence; there’s a chapter room; a dormitory. It is the tall arches of the chapel ruins that take the breath away. Even in ruins, they look glorious. In Tintern Abbey, one can stand still and hear the whisper of the monks’ prayers. The footfalls of Wordsworth. And tears of Lord Tennyson.
In Wales, words grow aplenty. Everywhere.