19 pages • 38 minutes read
Dylan ThomasI See the Boys of Summer
Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 1939A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Background
Literary Context
“I see the boys of summer” channels many of the aesthetic choices seen with the Romantic artists of the previous centuries. Aesthetically, Romanticism pushed against the rigid constraints of Classicism, embracing an emotional tone, and thematically focused on individualism and glorifying nature. Thomas paints strong images of nature throughout his poem. In the first section, scenes of the lightness and darkness of the natural world appear in every stanza. Nature also provides abundance: apples, honey, new life. Thomas’s verb choice in the first section likewise elicits strong emotions. The boys drown the cargoed apples in Line 4, sour honey in Line 6, and light bursts from their throats in Line 23. In the second section, Stanzas 5-8, Thomas continues crafting vivid depictions of the natural world and embeds them with emotions. Winter personified as a sleepy man in Line 29 makes winter’s agency feel purposeful, and the seventh stanza roars with images of boys and men uprooting the ocean and choking the desert. The poem repeatedly embraces a strong, willful emotion, combined with vivid and creative descriptions of the natural world, and the final section reiterates this. Men may stand in ruin, but they are also laborers, workers of the land: “We are the sons of flint and pitch” (53). Men contribute to the cycle of life and death seen in nature by both creating and destroying. The poem’s focus on humanity’s relationship and connection to nature, and the powerful emotional tone, make “I see the boys of summer” a work indebted to Romanticism.
Despite the Romantic inspiration in his work, Thomas avoided being categorized into one strict artistic movement. He does not choose to glorify people and nature with strictly idyllic imagery. “I see the boys of summer” is filled with images of decay and ruin. Nature is strongly elicited, but it often suffers at the hands of the titular boys. The poem’s focus on the destructive and creative potential of man makes the poem distinct, darker than poems from previous periods of Romanticism (see William Blake’s “Of Summer” in Further Readings and Resources). With its strong emotions ruminating on life and death, “I see the boys of summer” fits cohesively into Thomas’s larger body of work. Thomas’s most famous works, such as “Do not go gentle in that good night,” was published later in his career, 1951, and shows the artist’s lifelong interest in thinking about death while recalling strong emotions.
Historical Context
Thomas was born in 1914 and came of age between the first and second World Wars. His birthplace of Swansea, Wales, is a coastal town and might have influenced Thomas’s ability to craft strong images of the natural world. However, no specific location is referenced in “I see the boys of summer,” and the poem avoids any direct references to events that might have been occurring at the time it was written, making the poem more an analysis of the human condition than a critique of the period in which Thomas lived. This aligns with Thomas’s work as a whole. While many established and budding poets were using their work to comment on societal issues of the time, Thomas refrained from that conceit in his art. Rather, the poem captures a sense of intense emotional observation of the changing seasons and the passage of time.
“I see the boys of summer” creates a sense of foreboding concerning a boy’s journey into manhood. In the poem, the youthful boys of summer are doomed to become men of nothing, and they end the poem as men in a maggot-filled barren. This anxiety might hint at Thomas’s fear of finding his place in the world; he was a young man when he wrote it without an established vocation. Thomas spent most of his life struggling financially, and “I see the boys of summer” shows, at a young age, he was worried about the ruinous direction a boy’s life could take.
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By Dylan Thomas
