Especially When the October Wind

It's been a very blowy day. My attempts to tidy up withered leaves and stalks in the garden were defeated when everything was snatched and whirled away as soon as I cut it. I made a brief sortie to the coast and wondered about how to capture the wind through a lens. It's invisible so you can only photograph its effects on branches, say, or a washing line or a plume of smoke, or in this case a tuft of grass blown sideways but it's still only a static instant in time.

Perhaps words are a better medium for conveying wind. This early poem by Dylan Thomas does so brilliantly to my mind.

Especially when the October wind
With frosty fingers punishes my hair,
Caught by the crabbing sun I walk on fire
And cast a shadow crab upon the land,
By the sea’s side, hearing the noise of birds,
Hearing the raven cough in winter sticks,
My busy heart who shudders as she talks
Sheds the syllabic blood and drains her words.

Shut, too, in a tower of words, I mark
On the horizon walking like the trees
The wordy shapes of women, and the rows
Of the star-gestured children in the park.
Some let me make you of the vowelled beeches,
Some of the oaken voices, from the roots
Of many a thorny shire tell you notes,
Some let me make you of the water’s speeches.

Behind a pot of ferns the wagging clock
Tells me the hour’s word, the neural meaning
Flies on the shafted disk, declaims the morning
And tells the windy weather in the cock.
Some let me make you of the meadow’s signs;
The signal grass that tells me all I know
Breaks with the wormy winter through the eye.
Some let me tell you of the raven’s sins.

Especially when the October wind
(Some let me make you of autumnal spells,
The spider-tongued, and the loud hill of Wales)
With fists of turnips punishes the land,
Some let me make you of the heartless words.
The heart is drained that, spelling in the scurry
Of chemic blood, warned of the coming fury.
By the sea’s side hear the dark-vowelled birds.

The words gust at you as fast and furious as a gale, hurling image after image like scudding leaves so you barely have time to catch one before the next hits. It's not an easy poem to disentangle and some of the suggested meanings I've found are frankly ridiculous. For example one analyst announces that 'signal grass' is an actual species. Well it is, but only in the tropics! Surely Thomas is referring to (this) windblown grass that semaphores the direction of the blast. 'The crabbing sun' has attracted several colourful interpretations but to me the image suggests its slanted sinking towards the winter solstice.
[It's also worth pointing out that several versions I've found online perpetuate the typo 'post' instead of 'pot' at the beginning of the 3rd stanza.]
In essence I think the poem is about about writing, about words, and about the poet's creative task of transmuting the sensual experience into the verbal.
What's your opinion?


To hear the poem in the poet's own voice click here.