Too Dear for My Possessing

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Before each became a famous and accomplished writer, just as their work was beginning to garner attention, British author Pamela Hansford Johnson and Welsh poet Dylan Thomas were briefly but deeply in love with one another. While the relationship did not last, and both Pamela and Dylan married someone else, the feelings persisted and can be seen in their work.

In 1940, Pamela's novel Too Dear for My Possessing was published. It was the first book in what would become known as her Helena Trilogy, and centered around the relationship between a stepmother, Helena Archer, and her stepson, Claud Pickering. 

Dylan's middle name was Marlais. TDM P. Dylan Marlais Thomas, a wild man-child, and the far more staid and reserved Pamela 'Helena' Hansford, who may have felt thrust into a maternal role at times during her relationship with Dylan.

Pickering is a reference to Pamela and Dylan's happiest times together, when they would collaborate to write poems, alternating lines, in a garden at the Six Bells Pub in Chelsea, London.

Pamela divorced her first husband in 1949 and remarried, to a man named Lord Charles Percy Snow, in 1950.

In 1951, Dylan's poem "Do not go gentle into that good night" was published. It featured the line "Rage, rage against the dying of the light."

The name Helena means light.

The poem also remembers thei time at the Six Bells Pub writing alternate lines, referencing "forked words". Each line in the poem ends in a forked letter, either a Y or a T.

While the poem is often interpreted as being about Dylan's father, who was in poor health when it was published, it is, like much of what Dylan writes, more about Pamela than anything else, including his mourning over Pamela remarrying.

I used all the words from Dylan's poem and wrote a new one. It's a bit further down the page.