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“Poem in October” Introduction
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"Poem in October" is Welsh poet Dylan Thomas's ecstatic reflection on the rhythms of life. The poem's speaker, celebrating his 30th birthday on a soft October morning in the countryside, climbs a hill to admire the view—and finds himself transported back into his childhood by an unexpected rush of sunlight. Human beings, this poem suggests, are eternally connected to the beautiful "mystery" of life, and their "heart's truth," first discovered in youth, never dies. This poem was first collected in Thomas's 1946 book Deaths and Entrances.
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“Poem in October” Summary
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The speaker tells the story of his thirtieth birthday. He woke up that morning to the sounds of the harbor, the nearby woods, and the seashore (spotted with mussel pools and overseen by priestly herons). The morning seemed to call him out with the repetitive, prayer-like sounds of the water, the calls of birds, and the sound of boats knocking against the fishermen's dock. He felt as if he had to go outside right that moment into the quiet, early-morning town.
His birthday, he says, started with the sounds of all the sea birds and forest birds carrying his name above the farmland and its white horses. He got up and walked out into the rain, feeling as if all the days of his life were showering down on him. It was high tide; the speaker saw a hunting heron dive into the water as he followed the path out of town. When the gates closed behind him, the people of the town were just starting to wake up.
Out in the countryside, the speaker saw a flock of larks flying by in a massive cloud, heard blackbirds singing in the bushes, and felt an unexpectedly summery October sunlight as he climbed a hill. This gentle warmth and sweet birdsong came as a surprise: the speaker had wandered up above the rain and cold wind of the woods further down below him.
From this height, he could see faint rain falling over the tiny, faraway harbor, the church (which, wet with seawater, looked about as small as a snail, with its towers forming the snail's horns), and the castle (which looked brown as an owl). Out where he was, though, past the edge of town and beneath the cloud of larks, he felt as if he had stepped into the blossoming gardens of spring and summer. Up here, he felt ready to gaze in wonder at the landscape all day—but then the weather changed.
The clouds rolled away from the sweet countryside and into the distance, and the changed blue sky was full of glorious summery sunlight, as if the very air were full of ripe fruit. In that moment of change, the speaker felt as if he were reliving long-ago mornings from his childhood—days when he used to go out walking with his mother through beams of sunlight that seemed to teach mysterious lessons, and through sacred forest groves...
...and through fields he saw afresh as if he were only a little baby. Feeling again as he did when he was a child, it was as if his tears and his heart were his boyhood self's again. These very woods, rivers, and shores were where, as a boy in the long-lost past, he whispered his deepest joys to the trees, the stones, and the fishes. The mystery of life was still alive for him then, singing in the waters and the birds.
On this hilltop, feeling all these remembered feelings, he could have spent his whole day in wonder—but then the weather changed. He felt the living joy of his long-lost childhood self still there underneath the hot sunlight. It was his thirtieth birthday; he stood there in what felt like midday in summer, even though the leaves on the trees in the town below were turning their autumnal red. He prayed: "May I still find my deepest, truest feelings here on this hilltop a year from now."
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“Poem in October” Themes
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The Rhythm of Life and the Beauty of Aging
“Poem in October” tells the story of the speaker's thirtieth birthday. On that day, he remembers, he felt both as if he were making a journey toward “heaven”—that is, his eventual death—and as if time had turned backward. Wandering through a well-known and beloved country landscape, it was as if all his childhood joy had returned to him. Aging, this poem suggests, doesn’t just mean growing older, accepting change, and leaving the past behind. It also means revisiting and rediscovering the past, getting ever more familiar with what matters to you the most, and becoming a truer and richer version of the person you’ve always been.
The morning of his thirtieth birthday, the speaker says, feels like the start of his “thirtieth year to heaven”: a stop on the journey toward the end of life. The soft autumnal landscape around him, with its “pale rain” and “mists,” reflects his sense that he’s getting older and leaving his youth behind. Just as the arrival of autumn means that summer is ending, hitting one’s thirties means that one is on the way to middle age. A mature man now, the speaker feels ready to “marvel” at the loveliness of the countryside in autumn and enjoy reflecting on “a shower of all [his] days”—words that suggest he can appreciate this stage of his life for what it is, rather than mourning his lost youth or regretting that time keeps on relentlessly passing.
But just when the speaker has settled in to “marvel [his] birthday away,” something unexpected happens: “the weather turn[s] around.” As he climbs a high hill, he emerges from autumn clouds into a rush of “summery” sunlight that seems to turn the calendar backward—and with it, his life. The sunlit landscape puts him right back in the middle of his happy boyhood, calling up the “joy of the long dead child” in him: faraway “forgotten mornings” when he walked through summer forests with his mother, listening to “legends” and basking in the beautiful “mystery” of life. That “long dead child,” the poem suggests, isn’t dead at all. Even as the speaker gets older, his joyful younger self’s “heart” and “tears” are still inside him, ready to reemerge.
This renewed contact with his childhood self fills the speaker with deep joy. Feeling that the emotions of his youth are still with him makes him excited to look forward to his next stages in life: he concludes the poem by praying that his “heart’s truth” might “still be sung / On this high hill in a year’s turning.” Aging, the poem thus suggests, isn’t merely a one-way journey toward death. It’s a rich, meandering, cumulative process, and one in which the “heart’s truth,” first felt in childhood, is an eternal touchstone.
Where this theme appears in the poem:- Lines 1-70
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Humanity, Nature, and Spirituality
The speaker of “Poem in October” finds joy, meaning, and renewal in his connection with the natural world. On the morning of his birthday, he feels as if he’s being summoned out into the countryside by the calls of “larks” and “rooks,” the lapping waves, and the winds. All of nature seems to reflect what’s going on inside him, showing him that his life is connected to the life of the whole world. To this speaker, being alive means being part of nature, interwoven with its rhythms—and this connection is a source of “wonder,” awe, and “mystery.”
The speaker marks his thirtieth birthday by going on a long walk out in the countryside, where he feels connected to nature in more ways than one. Besides “marvel[ing]” at the plain loveliness of birdsong and ripening autumn fruit, he feels as if his own life is following the rhythm of the seasons. The autumn “mists” and “pale rain” remind him that he’s getting older, leaving his youth behind. But when the “weather turn[s] around” and a blaze of “summery” sunlight breaks through the autumn clouds, he feels as if he’s a child again, enjoying the summer woods with the same sense of “wonder” he felt when he was little.
In other words, the speaker’s whole life is intertwined with the rhythms of nature: when the young summery sun comes out, his young summery self comes out, too. Understanding that he’s intimately connected with the world around him, the speaker feels a surge of delight that the “mystery” of existence is “alive” in him as much as it’s in “the water and singing birds.” Humanity, this poem suggests, is mysteriously woven together with all of nature and all of life—and the moments in which people recognize this are profoundly moving and meaningful.
Where this theme appears in the poem:- Lines 1-70
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Line-by-Line Explanation & Analysis of “Poem in October”
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Lines 1-4
It was my ...
... Priested shore"Poem in October" begins with these solemn and joyful words:
It was my thirtieth year to heaven
That's a pretty dramatic way to say "it was my thirtieth birthday." Every birthday, this line suggests, is just a milestone on the way to death—and who knows how many more years it will take to get there?
To this speaker, the idea is an uplifting one. He's not just ticking off the days until he's dead. He's a pilgrim on the road to heaven. His sense of life as a mysterious, sublime, and thrilling pilgrimage will animate this whole poem: he'll spend the morning of his thirtieth birthday on a walk that mirrors that lifelong heavenward journey.
Even at the moment he wakes up, the speaker feels there's something special in the air this morning. Even as he lies in bed, he can see the landscape around his home in his mind's eye: his "hearing" of the "harbour," the "neighbour wood," and the "mussel pooled" and "heron / Priested shore" lays those landmarks out for him (and for the reader!) as vividly as if he were a bird flying above the whole scene. (Not coincidentally, the speaker seems to be describing Dylan Thomas's native Wales; this speaker has more than a little in common with his author.)
The speaker's instant familiarity with the landscape already suggests that he loves this place—and his language suggests he sees it as sacred. When he describes the shore as "heron priested," he's not only evoking the stern, stiff-legged, priestly dignity of herons (though he's certainly doing that). He's also hinting that nature is innately holy. The "shore" here becomes the herons' church; just by living their lives, these birds preach a wordless sermon.
The speaker will make his journey into this landscape in seven stanzas of free verse. While the poem won't use any regular rhyme scheme or meter, it will still take on a regular, pulsing shape: each stanza uses a predictable pattern of longer and shorter lines, evoking both the hilly landscape the speaker will soon climb into and the larger rhythm of life he'll explore.
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Lines 5-10
...
... and set forth.
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Lines 11-16
My birthday ...
... all my days. -
Lines 17-20
High tide and ...
... the town awoke. -
Lines 21-25
A springful ...
... the hill's shoulder, -
Lines 26-30
Here were fond ...
... faraway under me. -
Lines 31-37
Pale rain ...
... lark full cloud. -
Lines 38-45
...
... and red currants -
Lines 46-52
And I saw ...
... moved in mine. -
Lines 53-60
These were ...
... water and singingbirds. -
Lines 61-67
And there ...
... with October blood. -
Lines 68-70
...
... a year's turning.
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“Poem in October” Symbols
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Summer and Autumn
Summer and autumn symbolize the speaker's youth and his coming middle age, respectively. These ideas might feel pretty familiar: readers only need to look to two of Shakespeare's most famous poems to see that summer and autumn have played these symbolic roles in poetry for a long time.
This speaker, however, does something novel with his seasonal symbolism. Rather than mourning that his youthful summer is over and he's heading into the drizzly autumn of middle age (or even embracing that change, as Keats did), this speaker experiences a flashback to his summery youth when sunlight breaks through the autumn clouds; as far as he's concerned, the "long dead" boy in him is really still there in his "heart." A person's seasons of life, this speaker feels, can roll backwards as well as forwards: the summer is still present even in the autumn of life.
Where this symbol appears in the poem:- Lines 14-16: “And I rose / In rainy autumn / And walked abroad in a shower of all my days.”
- Lines 21-25: “ A springful of larks in a rolling / Cloud and the roadside bushes brimming with whistling / Blackbirds and the sun of October / Summery / On the hill's shoulder,”
- Line 40: “the weather turned around.”
- Lines 41-45: “ It turned away from the blithe country / And down the other air and the blue altered sky / Streamed again a wonder of summer / With apples / Pears and red currants”
- Lines 53-57: “These were the woods the river and sea / Where a boy / In the listening / Summertime of the dead whispered the truth of his joy / To the trees and the stones and the fish in the tide.”
- Lines 62-64: “the weather turned around. And the true / Joy of the long dead child sang burning / In the sun.”
- Lines 66-67: “stood there then in the summer noon / Though the town below lay leaved with October blood.”
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Borders and Gates
When the speaker crosses the "border" that separates the town from the countryside (and closes the "gate") behind him, he's also symbolically crossing a number of other boundaries: between youth and middle age, the past and the present, and civilization and nature.
When the speaker wakes up on his thirtieth birthday, he feels he has to leave town "that second" and "set forth" for a nearby hillside. Stepping outside the bustle of everyday life in his little village, he's also stepping into a direct encounter with nature—and thus with his childhood self, whose "true joy" he feels in the summery sunlight that breaks through the autumn clouds. Even as he steps over the border between the first and second halves of his life, he also steps backward into the past.
Where this symbol appears in the poem:- Lines 17-20: “High tide and the heron dived when I took the road / Over the border / And the gates / Of the town closed as the town awoke.”
- Lines 35-37: “But all the gardens / Of spring and summer were blooming in the tall tales / Beyond the border and under the lark full cloud.”
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Climbing the Hill
The speaker's meditative climb up a hill symbolizes his growing wisdom.
Hills are common symbols for fresh perspectives and deeper understandings. From high on a hillside, one can see the big picture: for instance, the speaker gets a view of his entire hometown, with its "sea wet church" and "castle." Things that might seem huge and looming right up close look small and almost endearing from above.
The speaker's birthday hill-climb thus suggests that he's stepping back to see his whole life from above—and to realize that his boyhood self is still part of the picture, even though he might not always recognize this in his day-to-day.
Where this symbol appears in the poem:- Line 25: “the hill's shoulder,”
- Line 30: “the wood faraway under me.”
- Lines 31-33: “ Pale rain over the dwindling harbour / And over the sea wet church the size of a snail / With its horns through mist”
- Lines 66-70: “stood there then in the summer noon / Though the town below lay leaved with October blood. / O may my heart's truth / Still be sung / On this high hill in a year's turning.”
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“Poem in October” Poetic Devices & Figurative Language
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Repetition
Rich repetitions allow the poem's language to mirror the speaker's deep belief that all life is part of one big, rhythmic cycle.
Perhaps the most striking repetitions are the full lines that reappear across the poem. The speaker begins and ends his tale with the words "it was my thirtieth year to heaven," a line that plays with time in two different ways:
- On the one hand, the phrasing "my thirtieth year to heaven" suggests that the speaker sees his life as a journey toward death. He might not know when he's going to reach "heaven," but he knows he's made thirty years of progress in that direction!
- On the other, by repeating the phrase at the beginning and towards the end of the poem, the speaker reminds readers that the whole mystical experience he describes in this poem, which soars through his past, his present, and his hopes for what he'll be doing in "a year's turning," takes place in one small spot of time: his thirtieth birthday.
- This repetition suggests that, while time can't turn backward, it's also not just a straight line!
The poem's other full-line repetition does something similar. From his perch up on a hill, the speaker declares:
There could I marvel
My birthday
Away but the weather turned around.The same words appear at the beginning of the final stanza. Again, there's a repeated image of standing still to "marvel" the time away connected with an image of "turn[ing] around": when the weather turns, so will the speaker's experience of his life, until he feels as if he's living his boyhood feelings again. In both these repeated lines, then, time moves forward, stands still, and turns around, all at once!
Other repetitions show how joyfully overwhelmed the speaker feels by the abundant beauty around him. Take a look at his polysyndeton as he describes waking up on his birthday:
Woke to my hearing from harbour and neighbour wood
And the mussel pooled and the heron
Priested shoreAll those "ands" make it feel as if the speaker can't stop finding something new to delight in everywhere he looks. This isn't just a laundry list of nearby interesting landmarks, but a moment of rediscovery: the speaker notices each of these features of the landscape carefully, one by one.
The word "and" plays an important role all through this poem, in fact. Many lines begin with the word, creating a thread of anaphora that subtly suggests the continuity and odd mystical logic of the speaker's experience: he wakes up and feels that the world is beautiful and walks out and watches the sun come out and feels transported back to his childhood. The speaker's "ands" evoke both the momentum of this meaningful day and the speaker's sense of glorious abundance. His "heart's truth," the poem's repetitions suggest, will never burn out; there's always another "and" coming.
Where repetition appears in the poem:- Line 1: “It was my thirtieth year to heaven”
- Line 2: “and”
- Line 3: “And,” “and”
- Line 7: “And”
- Lines 11-12: “the water- / Birds and the birds of the winged trees”
- Line 14: “And”
- Line 16: “And”
- Line 19: “And”
- Line 20: “the town closed as the town awoke.”
- Line 22: “and”
- Line 23: “and”
- Lines 38-40: “ There could I marvel / My birthday / Away but the weather turned around.”
- Line 41: “ It turned”
- Line 42: “And”
- Line 46: “And”
- Line 50: “And”
- Line 51: “And”
- Line 58: “And”
- Lines 61-62: “ And there could I marvel my birthday / Away but the weather turned around.”
- Lines 65-66: “It was my thirtieth / Year to heaven”
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Enjambment
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Metaphor
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Personification
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Imagery
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Assonance
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“Poem in October” Vocabulary
Select any word below to get its definition in the context of the poem. The words are listed in the order in which they appear in the poem.
- My thirtieth year to heaven
- The net webbed wall
- Brimming
- Fond climates
- Horns
- Marvel
- Blithe
- Parables
- Infancy
My thirtieth year to heaven-
(Location in poem: Line 1: “my thirtieth year to heaven”)
In other words, "my thirtieth birthday." The speaker is measuring out his life as a step-by-step journey toward the afterlife.
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Form, Meter, & Rhyme Scheme of “Poem in October”
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Form
While "Poem in October" is written in free verse (without a rhyme scheme or consistent meter), its shape on the page follows a repetitive pattern, like the rhythm of the seasons. Each of the poem's seven 10-line stanzas pulses between longer and shorter lines, giving the verse a sinuous, rolling look. This shape evokes both the hilly countryside the speaker climbs through and the poem's emotions: like the poem's shape, the speaker's life is cyclical, returning and returning to the "heart's truth" he first knew in his childhood.
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Meter
"Poem in October" is written in free verse, so it doesn't have a strict meter. It does, however, use a predictable pattern of changing line lengths to create rhythm and music. Each stanza pulses from longer lines to shorter ones and back again, evoking the natural rhythms the speaker describes: the seasons, the weather, and the movements of the human heart.
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Rhyme Scheme
This free verse poem doesn't use a rhyme scheme. The lack of perfect end rhymes makes the poem sound airy, open, and naturalistic. But the language is still threaded through with slant rhyme, alliteration, and assonance, musical devices that make the lines sing.
For instance, listen to the echoing sounds in these lines from the end of the second stanza:
High tide and the heron dived when I took the road
Over the border
And the gates
Of the town closed as the town awoke.Long /i/ and /o/ assonance weaves these lines together, and even create a slant end rhyme between "road" and "awoke." There's nothing so tight as a regular rhyme scheme here, but there's plenty of harmony—a choice that suits the speaker's sense of harmonious connection to the natural world around him.
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“Poem in October” Speaker
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The poem's speaker is a voice for Dylan Thomas, an October birthday boy himself (he was born on October 27). Thomas wrote several birthday poems, often using the occasion to reflect on his relationship to the natural world. This poem expresses his sense that people are part of the same life force that animates nature; people are certainly mortal, he felt, but they're also part of a deathless eternal "mystery."
It only seems fitting, then, that when the "weather turn[s] around" and a flash of summery sunlight illuminates the autumnal landscape, the speaker feels as if his own life has turned around, too. A taste of an earlier time of the year spirits him away to an earlier time in his years—a time when, as a boy, he felt even more intimately connected to the joyful "truth" of the world. That mystical little boy is still very much alive in him now.
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“Poem in October” Setting
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Readers can assume that "Poem in October" is likely set in Laugharne, the small Welsh town where Dylan Thomas and his family lived for a number of years (and where Thomas is now buried). Walking out into the countryside early in the morning on a misty autumn day, the speaker takes in poignantly beautiful views of sea, hill, and wood.
The speaker's loving attention to the town's landscape and wildlife suggests that he's intimately familiar with this place; in fact, the countryside feels as much a part of him as his childhood. Emotional geography, the poem's setting suggests, is interwoven with physical geography: a person's life and nature's life aren't really separate things.
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Literary and Historical Context of “Poem in October”
Literary Context
The Welsh poet Dylan Thomas (1914-1953) was part of the second generation of Modernists. This group of 20th-century writers (which included figures like T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound) sought new forms of expression, leaving behind the formal conventions of the 19th century to write daring, expansive, psychologically acute poetry in never-before-tried shapes.
Thomas was something of a prodigy. He published many of his intense, idiosyncratic poems when he was just a teenager. While his stylistic inventiveness places him among the Modernists, his pantheistic feelings about nature and his passionate sincerity also mark him as a descendent of 19th-century Romantic poets like William Blake and John Keats (both of whom he read enthusiastically). He also admired his contemporaries W.B. Yeats and W.H. Auden, who, like him, often wrote of the "mystery" behind everyday life (though in very different ways).
This poem is one of several birthday poems Thomas wrote, which often stress both his sense of his own mortality and his rapturous belief that he was part of the eternal life of nature. Modern readers might be a little alarmed that Thomas interprets his "thirtieth year to heaven" (only his thirtieth birthday!) as an occasion to feel autumnally middle-aged. However, when he wrote this poem he was well past the midpoint of his short life: he died of pneumonia (exacerbated by what he hyperbolically described as "eighteen straight whiskeys") at the age of 39, only a few years after "Poem in October" was first published.
Historical Context
Dylan Thomas made his first notes for this poem in 1941 and completed it in 1944, just before the end of World War II (which ran from 1939-1945). The bloody, destructive war hit close to home for Thomas: Swansea, his beloved Welsh hometown, was badly damaged by German air raids.
Thomas was appalled not only by that great loss, but also by the rise of fascism across Europe in the 1930s and '40s. A passionate leftist, he even wrote comical anti-fascist propaganda films mocking Hitler and Mussolini for the UK government during the war.
His poetry, however, is rarely directly political. In "Poem in October" as in many of his great works, he's a mystic, not an activist: he looks inward to his "heart's truth" and outward to the eternal life of the world, feeling the two intimately connected.
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More “Poem in October” Resources
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External Resources
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A Brief Biography — Learn more about Thomas's life and work at the Poetry Foundation's website.
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The Poem Aloud — Listen to Dylan Thomas himself reading the poem aloud (and get a sense of how he heard its swinging rhythms).
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Thomas's Legacy — Visit the website of the Dylan Thomas Centre to learn about Thomas's enduring influence.
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A Portrait of Thomas — Take a look at a portrait of Thomas and learn something about his rowdy reputation. (His portraitist, Augustus John, remembers that Thomas was more likely to pose patiently if you gave him a bottle of beer to keep him quiet!)
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Thomas on Art — Listen to a recording of one of Thomas's final public appearances, in which he wittily discusses film and poetry.
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LitCharts on Other Poems by Dylan Thomas
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