Explore "On no Work of Words" by Dylan Thomas on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
On no work of words now for three lean months in the bloody / Belly of the rich year and the big purse of my body / I bitterly take to task my poverty and craft: / To take to give is all, return what is hungrily given
Puffing the pounds of manna up through the dew to heaven, / The lovely gift of the gab bangs back on a blind shaft.
To lift to leave from the treasures of man is pleasing death / That will rake at last all currencies of the marked breath / And count the taken, forsaken mysteries in a bad dark.
To surrender now is to pay the expensive ogre twice.
Ancient woods of my blood, dash down to the nut of the seas / If I take to burn or return this world which is each man's work.
I, the first named / I, the first named, am the ghost of this sir and Christian friend / Who writes these words I write in a still room in a spellsoaked house: / I am the ghost in this house that is filled with tongues and eyes / Of a lack-a-head ghost I fear to the anonymous end.