Description

Behind a pot of ferns the wagging clock
Tells me the hour’s word, the neural meaning
Flies on the shafted disc, 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.

 

While October has resonance as the month of my birth, references to Swansea had no special relevance, for I had not lived

here for any length of time. Of course the poetry has meaning beyond local links and I bought the Collected Poems in 1972 when still in the Netherlands.

When in Margam Park one November evening, with the last light and drawn out shadows on the ground,I crouched down to pick up a leaf and remembered the poem, its shifting interpretations and layers of meaning. I imagined Thomas like this when describing the ‘meadow’s signs’ and ‘signal grass’. The print places the viewer in this position while the hand holding a blade ofgrass hints at the act of writing.

I wanted to emphasise low light and long shadows to bring a great deal of chiaroscuro into the print. My design closed in on the central part of the first roughs. Original elements combined into a morestark, graphic image, with an impression of wind and movement,while retaining the mood of a last hour of daylight. I used a ratherloose, sketchy style of drawing, quite fluid, merely noting down whatcould be grasses and wind, without wishing to define these further.

There were influences from working in the studio at Clarence Street, from tests with soft ground and aquatints, and from manyconversations.

Soft ground etching on copper, bitten in weak Ferric Chloride. Airbrushed acrylic ‘aquatint’; some scraping and burnishing