Explore "When I Woke" by Dylan Thomas on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
When I woke, the town spoke.
Birds and clocks and cross bells / Dinned aside the coiling crowd, / The reptile profligates in a flame,
Spoilers and pokers of sleep, / The next-door sea dispelled / Frogs and satans and woman-luck, / While a man outside with a billhook, / Up to his head in his blood,
Cutting the morning off, / The warm-veined double of Time / And his scarving beard from a book, / Slashed down the last snake as though / It were a wand or subtle bough,
Its tongue peeled in the wrap of a leaf.
Every morning I make, / God in bed, good and bad, / After a water-face walk, / The death-stagged scatter-breath
Mammoth and sparrowfall / Everybody's earth.
Where birds ride like leaves and boats like ducks / I heard, this morning, waking, / Crossly out of the town noises
A voice in the erected air, / No prophet-progeny of mine, / Cry my sea town was breaking.
No Time, spoke the clocks, no God, rang the bells, / I drew the white sheet over the islands
And the coins on my eyelids sang like shells.