Dylan Thomas: The Map Of Love

The Map of Love was first published in 1939. A collection of 16 poems and seven short stories, much of it was written around the time of Thomas' wedding to Caitlin and her pregnancy with their first child Llewelyn.

In the poems, Thomas moves away from the internal focus of his poetry in order to examine these new relationships, and reassesses his career in the face of increasing responsibilities.

Among his most personal poems are those concerning his unborn child. In 'If my head hurt a hair's foot' he imagines a tender conversation between a mother and the foetus within her about the approaching birth. For Thomas this is a momentous event which is also characteristically associated with pain and mortality. In A Saint About To Fall he describes a supernatural process which "Bullies into rough seas you so gentle" and exposes a child to the struggle of life on earth.

In contrast, the poem After The Funeral relates his personal experience of death. It was dedicated to the memory of his aunt Ann Jones and was his first to be written about a real person. Thomas criticises the "mule praises" of convention which do her injustice, and, electing himself Ann's bard, he writes a "skyward statue" to commemorate her life.

Several poems in the collection assess the role of poetry in his life. In 'Once it was the colour of saying' he makes a decision about the future of his work. Thomas acknowledges that his readers have been "charmingly drowned" in the complexity of his poetry, and resolves instead that his "saying shall be his undoing". He decides that in future he will undo his own style and tone down his difficult language.

The style and themes of the short stories in this collection cannot be easily separated from those of the poetry. Phrases such as "tree of words" and "falling fences" from the story The Visitor recall the verbal complexity of Thomas' poems.

More specifically, ideas can be traced which grow and develop between the two mediums. The woman in the asylum in the story The Mouse And The Women also appears as his muse in a later poem Love In The Asylum. Similarly, the birds she beckons can be found in a poem in this collection, The Spire Cranes, as symbols for Thomas' poems.

Thomas approaches both birth and death with the same fatalism and unconventional spirituality because, for him, both events are part of the same universal theme. What concerns him most as a poet is how best to communicate these experiences in words. Throughout his texts, in both his poems and short stories, Thomas is seen to be constantly assessing the effectiveness of his own writing.