Just a little bit of Dylan Thomas

When I was in middle school and passage was brought to my attention. I was moved by it. I wrote it out and hung it up in my room. It continued to inspire me for years later and it helped me to discover a passion of mine - writing. After high school I moved out and lost the passage. Twelve years have one by since then and it was recently brought to my attention again. Someone asked for good book quotes and I immediately thought of this passage. I searched the interwebs for it and after some quick goat thinking - I found it. Below is only part of the entire passage but this excerpt is the part that I had hanging on my wall.

An excerpt from Notes on the Art of Poetry by Dylan Thomas

You want to know why and how I just began to write poetry, and which poets or kinds of poetry I was first moved and influenced by.

To answer the first part of this question, I should say I wanted to write poetry in the beginning because I had fallen in love with words. The first poems I knew were nursery rhymes, and before I could read them for myself I had come to love just the words of them, the words alone. What the words stood for, symbolized, or meant was of very secondary importance. What mattered was the sound of them as I heard them for the first time on the lips of the remote and incomprehensible grown-ups who seemed, for some reason, to be living in my world. And these words were, to me, as the notes of bells, the sounds of musical instruments, the noises of wind, sea, and rain, the rattle of milk carts, the clopping of hooves on cobbles, the fingering of branches on a window pane, might be to someone, deaf from birth, who has miraculously found his hearing. I did not know what the words said, overmuch, nor what happened to Jack and Jill and the Mother Goose rest of them; I cared of the shape of sound that their names, and the words cast on my eyes. I realize that I may be, as I think back all that way, romanticizing my reactions to the simple and beautiful words of those pure poems; but that is all I can honestly remember, however much time might have falsified my memory. I fell in love - that is the only expression that I can think of - at once, and am still at the mercy of words, though sometimes now, knowing a little of their behavior very well, I think I can influence them slightly and have even learned to beat them now and then, which they appear to enjoy. I tumbled for words at once. And, when I began to read the nursery rhymes for myself, and, later, to read other verses and ballads, I knew that I had discovered the most important things, to me, that could be ever.

There they were, seemingly lifeless, made only of black and white, but out of them, out of their own being came love and terror and pity and pain and wonder and all the other vague abstractions that make our ephemeral lives dangerous, great, and bearable.