Portrait Of The Artist As A Young Dog: Dylan Thomas

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I was a lonely night-walker and a steady stander-at-corners. I liked to walk through the wet town after midnight, when the streets were deserted and the window lights out, alone and alive on the glistening tram-lines in dead and empty High Street under the moon, gigantically sad in the damp streets by ghostly Ebenezer Chapel. And I never felt more a part of the remote and overpressing world, or more full of love and arrogance and pity and humility, not for myself alone, but for the living earth I suffered on… [etc.]

Greenway, William. “The Gospel According to Dylan Thomas.” Notes on Contemporary Literature 20, no. 1 (January, 1990): 2-4. Does not assert that Thomas is a religious writer but that he achieved a biblical tone in much that he wrote. He heaped up the food on Stephen's plate and served uncle Charles and Mr Casey to large pieces of turkey and splashes of sauce. Mrs Dedalus was eating little and Dante sat with her hands in her lap. She was red in the face. Mr Dedalus rooted with the carvers at the end of the dish and said:Come now, come now, come now! Can we not have our opinions whatever they are without this bad temper and this bad language? It is too bad surely. Fleming knelt down, squeezing his hands under his armpits, his face contorted with pain; but Stephen knew how hard his hands were because Fleming was always rubbing rosin into them. But perhaps he was in great pain for the noise of the pandybat was terrible. Stephen's heart was beating and fluttering.

Sons of bitches! cried Mr Dedalus. When he was down they turned on him to betray him and rend him like rats in a sewer. Low-lived dogs! And they look it! By Christ, they look it! Let him remember too, cried Mr Casey to her from across the table, the language with which the priests and the priests' pawns broke Parnell's heart and hounded him into his grave. Let him remember that too when he grows up. Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow , said the prefect of studies. Make up your minds for that. Every day Father Dolan. Write away. You, boy, who are you?His father had told him, whatever he did, never to peach on a fellow. He shook his head and answered no and felt glad. And he saw Dante in a maroon velvet dress and with a green velvet mantle hanging from her shoulders walking proudly and silently past the people who knelt by the water's edge.

O how cold and strange it was to think of that! All the dark was cold and strange. There were pale strange faces there, great eyes like carriage-lamps. They were the ghosts of murderers, the figures of marshals who had received their death-wound on battlefields far away over the sea. What did they wish to say that their faces were so strange? The air was soft and grey and mild and evening was coming. There was the smell of evening in the air, the smell of the fields in the country where they digged up turnips to peel them and eat them when they went out for a walk to Major Barton's, the smell there was in the little wood beyond the pavilion where the gallnuts were. The episode title is a reference to James Joyce's 1916 novel "A Portrait Of The Artist As A Young Man." O well then, said the rector, Father Dolan did not understand. You can say that I excuse you from your lessons for a few days. Stephen looked at the plump turkey which had lain, trussed and skewered, on the kitchen table. He knew that his father had paid a guinea for it in Dunn's of D'Olier Street and that the man had prodded it often at the breastbone to show how good it was: and he remembered the man's voice when he had said:And the train raced on over the flat lands and past the Hill of Allen. The telegraph poles were passing, passing. The train went on and on. It knew. There were lanterns in the hall of his father's house and ropes of green branches. There were holly and ivy round the pierglass and holly and ivy, green and red, twined round the chandeliers. There were red holly and green ivy round the old portraits on the walls. Holly and ivy for him and for Christmas. On the day of the Talent Show, Prof. Twilley takes it upon himself to call Hank at work to get him to attend and show support for Bobby's clowning. Hank is horrified when he hears the Professor tell Bobby to practice a freaky bit and leaves the office after realizing his mistake. The rector looked at him in silence and he could feel the blood rising to his face and the tears about to rise to his eyes. He poured sauce freely over Stephen's plate and set the boat again on the table. Then he asked uncle Charles was it tender. Uncle Charles could not speak because his mouth was full; but he nodded that it was. He heard the voice of the prefect of the chapel saying the last prayers. He prayed it too against the dark outside under the trees.