PICTURING DYLAN: TEACHERS’ NOTES

Context These notes for teachers derive from a day-long workshop session organised by the National Library of Wales as part of the Welsh Government-funded Dylan 100 celebrations marking the centenary of Dylan Thomas’s birth. The workshop was led by poets Damian Walford Davies and Rhian Edwards, and was held at Amgueddfa Cymru-National Museum Wales on 6 June 2014 with a group of 25 Year 6 pupils from Ysgol Trelai.

Aims and objectives The Teachers’ Notes below are a template for ‘workshop’ sessions that offer Year 6 pupils exciting encounters with Dylan Thomas’s poetry and prose works. The aim of the activities is to bring together text and image – the verbal and the visual. A section from a poem or from a short story can be rendered less challenging by first being encountered through the ‘window’ of a fascinating object. Here, pupils are given access to the writer’s imaginative worlds through the portal of physical ‘objects’: the first a single, unusual entity; the second a ‘suite’ of visual representations of Dylan Thomas. For the initial workshop in Amgueddfa Cymru-National Museum Wales, these objects were drawn from the museum’s own collections, but they can easily be reproduced in a classroom context. Note that each group of activities can be stand-alone.

The activities dynamically enact the following:

 the ways in which text and image are dynamically related, in particular in a digital age.  the various ways in which we record, remember and reanimate writers and their work, emphasising their continuing relevance.

 the resonance of objects/images through which writers reanimate their own ‘pasts’.  the various forms in which the above takes place: written texts; visual images in different media (painting, photography); and everyday objects.  ways in which we can actively share and participate in the worlds of an author through these texts and objects.  the multiple forms that storytelling can take.  the ways in which an author’s work is a spur to one’s own creativity.

Transferability Although the original activities were based around the celebration of a particular author (Dylan Thomas) on a particular anniversary (the centenary year), the template offered here can be used, with appropriate alteration of detail, as a way of encountering other authors through the lens of a resonant object and through text-and-image pairings.

Outputs Pupils will work in pairs towards the production of word-and-image ‘posters’. (Outputs from the original workshop session were displayed in the Dylan 100 exhibition in the National Library of Wales during the summer of 2014.)

◌ TEACHERS’ NOTES: TEMPLATE

Frame and Context

Brief opening remarks should explain that pupils will be introduced to two ‘objects’ related in obvious, and more subtle, ways to an author’s life and his/her works. They will be encountering both physical objects and the authors’ words – both visual images and the written text – with the aim of stimulating them to create word-and-image texts of their own, relevant to their own experience.

ICEBREAKER/CATALYST: THE VERBAL CLOTHES LINE Dylan’s Words: ‘He’s the biggest liar in town’ (The character Lily Smalls, referring to Butcher Beynon, in Dylan Thomas’s ‘play for voices’, Under Milk Wood)

Prepare a ‘Verbal Clothes-Line’, comprising a line strung out across the classroom, attached to which are separate triangular pieces of ‘word-bunting’. On each of these pieces is written an unusual word/short phrase from the chosen author’s works. (In the original workshop, the text chosen was Dylan Thomas’s Under Milk Wood; words/phrases included ‘tortoiseshell comb’, ‘sea-dark street’, ‘white bone’, ‘confetti’, ‘mouseholes’, ‘clip-clop of horses’, and ‘curlew cry’).

Divide the pupils into pairs. Each pair in turn selects one or two pieces of bunting (and therefore words/phrases). The task is for each pair to create a convincing story relating to themselves that utilises the word/phrase, and for the rest of the class to decide whether or not they are telling the truth.

The activity introduces pupils to the verbal life and texture of an author’s work, and encourages them to create articulate and persuasive mini-tales from those verbal prompts.

OBJECT 1 Workshop and Task: ‘A Stuffed Fox’

(a) Reading, Listening and Discussing Passages from Dylan Thomas’s short story ‘The Peaches’ (1938) and ‘After the Funeral: In Memory of Ann Jones’ (March–April 1938) to be given to each pupil, as follows:

from ‘The Peaches’: The best room smelt of moth balls and fur and damp and dead plants and stale, sour air . . . You looked at the weed-grown vegetable garden though a stuffed fox’s legs, over a partridge’s head, along the red-paint-stained breast of a stiff wild duck . . .The best room was rarely used. Annie dusted and brushed and polished there once a week, but the carpet still sent up a grey cloud when you trod on it [. . .] Annie said, ‘Take your hat off, Gwilym; make Mrs Williams comfortable [. . .] ‘Don’t bother about me, there’s a dear,’ said Mrs Williams. ‘There’s a lovely fox!’ She flashed a finger of rings at the glass case. ‘It’s real blood,’ I told Jack, and we climbed over the sofa to the table. ‘No it isn’t, he said, ‘it’s red ink.’ ‘Oh, your shoes!’ said Annie. ‘Don’t tread on the sofa, Jack, there’s a dear.’ ‘If it isn’t ink it’s paint then.’ from ‘After the Funeral’: [. . . ] After the feast of tear-stuffed time and thistles In a room with a stuffed fox and a stale fern, I stand, for this memorial’s sake [. . .]

[. . .] until The stuffed lung of the fox twitch and cry Love And the strutting fern lay seeds and on the black sill.

Brief and accessible context should be given: both the short story and poem conjure/recall his Aunt Annie Jones, who farmed ‘Fernhill’, near the village of Llangain in rural Carmarthenshire. During the school holidays, suburban-Swansea-born Thomas used to stay on the farm with Annie and her husband Jim and their son Idris (‘Gwilym’ in ‘The Peaches’). The prose work portrays the living aunt, while the poem is an elegy to her (she died in 1933). (Thomas’s best-known poem, ‘Fern Hill’ (1946) would also recall his visits to the farm.)

For the initial workshop, the pupils were introduced to a stuffed and mounted fox in a case from the National Museum of Wales’s collections, similar to the one that Thomas recalls in both the short story and the memorialising poem. An image of a stuffed fox from the web would serve as well.

In both works, Thomas’s fox seems to gather to itself the child’s and the remembering adult’s feelings about the rural, old-fashioned, dusty, slightly unkempt and faintly wild nature of the farm, while also communicating a sense of adventure and danger – and a deathliness, of course. In the poem, the fox becomes a kind of second voice that mourns the loss both of the much-loved aunt and the lost childhood that is inextricably bound up with memories of her.

After reading out the two passages:

Ask the pupils for their initial responses to the uncanny object. What feelings does it evoke in them, both in itself and in the context of their encounter with Thomas’s two texts? Is the object strange in its moving stillness, its stuffed aliveness? Does Thomas evoke the feel of the best parlour of the farm effectively? Are such ‘best room[s]’ kept anymore?

(b) Poster Work on Object 1: ‘How the Fox Got into the Box’ Pupils to work in pairs – one as the artist, the other as the writer, or sharing the work – to create a poem-/prose-and-image ‘poster’ (A3) based on the idea of ‘How the Fox Got into the Box’. They might wish to create a poem or a story in the voice of the fox itself, explaining how it ended up thus caught in glass, on display . . . The poem or prose should be written under the image.

OBJECT 2 Workshop and Task Portraying Dylan: ‘Thick blubber lips . . . snub nose’ (from Dylan Thomas’s broadcast, ‘Return Journey’)

Pupils will be introduced to the following visual representations of Dylan Thomas:

– Augustus John’s oil painting of Dylan – Alfred Jane’s oil painting of Dylan – Photographs of Dylan by Rollie McKenna

All of the above are readily accessible on the web.

Context Dylan Thomas was an astonishingly young developer who spent his career mining the early notebooks he had filled from 1930 to 1934. He is also a great poet of a childhood now lost, but vividly summoned and reimagined. Time and its effects represent one of his central preoccupations.

What was time’s effect on the poet himself, judging from the representations of the young and older Dylan represented by the above images?

As a way in to these concepts, ask the pupils to listen to a section of Thomas’s own reading of the poem ‘Fern Hill’, in which, as noted already, he recalls the time he spent at his Aunt Annie’s farm in rural Carmarthenshire. The poem imaginatively invokes a lost childhood; it was partly motivated, in 1946, by Thomas’s fears of global catastrophe at the end of the Second World War, which heralded the atomic age.

Ask: How do the pupils respond to the three images they’ve been given? Can they suggest ages for Dylan in each case? What are the differences between the face in each? Do the oil paintings capture the face of a creative young man? Does the later photograph capture a very different face/image? What are the differences between the oil paintings and the photograph more generally?

The teacher can assist the pupils by prompting them to think in terms of youth and maturity, freshness and tiredness . . .

Then, as a prelude to the task: ask them to brainstorm for 10 minutes – what are the main physical differences between them and someone much older, whom they know? Have they seen pictures of that person when they were young?

Task: a ‘young and old’ poster (A3 again): pupils are asked to create, in pairs, a face or body divided vertically into young (left half) and old (right half). They can represent the young and older Dylan Thomas if they wish, or someone they know. They should also frame a short piece of prose or a poem on the theme ‘young and old’ below the face/body.

Pupils to present their two posters Brief presentations in pairs, with one pupil presenting on the ‘fox’ poster, and the other the ‘portrait’ poster.

Damian Walford Davies School of English, Communication & Philosophy John Percival Building Cardiff University [email protected]