For Valentine’s Day, a letter from the hand of Welsh poet Dylan Thomas that was written to his future wife Caitlin Macnamara in 1936, a few months after meeting her in a pub in the heart of London. They married the next year, thus beginning a tempestuous union that would continue until Thomas’ death in 1953, by which time they had navigated numerous stretches of choppy water and brought three children into the world.

Should you enjoy this letter, I would suggest getting your hands on Dylan Thomas: The Collected Letters, a sometimes gloomy book peppered with poetic flashes of brilliance and romance.

July 17, 1936
Caitlin darling darling, I caught lots of buses and went to sleep in them and ate wine gums in the train and got here awfully late in a sort of thunder storm. This morning I can’t do anything but sit with my headache and my liver in a higgledy piggledy room looking out on the rain, and now I’m trying to keep my hand steady to write a neat letter to you that isn’t all miserable because I’m not with you in Laugharne or in London or in Ringwood or whatever daft place you’re in without me. I dreamed all sorts of funny dreams in my big respectable feather bed – which is much much better than a battlement bed full of spiders – dreams with you in them all the time, and terrible ticking clocks, and vampires, and ladies with long arms putting out the light, and intimate black dogs just sitting on us.
I love you Caitlin. I love you more than anybody in the world. And yesterday – though it may be lots of yesterdays ago to you when this wobbly letter reaches you – was the best day in the world, in spite of dogs, and Augustus woofing, and being miserable because it had to stop. I love you for millions and millions of things, clocks and vampires and dirty nails and squiggly paintings and lovely hair and being dizzy and falling dreams. I want you to be with me; you can have all the spaces between the houses, and I can have a room with no windows; we’ll make a halfway house; you can teach me to walk in the air and I’ll teach you to make nice noises on the piano without any music; we’ll have a bed in a bar, as we said we would, and we shan’t have any money at all and we’ll live on other people’s, which they won’t like a bit.
The room’s full of they now, but I don’t care, I don’t care for anybody. I want to be with you because I love you. I don’t know what I love you means, except that I do. [words deleted] (I crossed that out. It was, ‘In 21 messy years’, but I don’t know what I was going to say). Write to me soon, very very soon, and tell me you really mean the things you said about you loving me too; if you don’t I shall cut my throat or go to the pictures.
I’m here in a nest of schoolmasters and vicars, majors, lawyers, doctors, maiden aunts; and you’re lord knows where, in the country, miles and miles from me, painting barmy ivy. Now I’m sad, I’m sad as hell, and I’ll have to go to a pub by myself & sit in the corner and mope. I’m going to mope about you and then I’m going to have a bath and I’m going to mope about you in the bath. Damn all this anyway; I only want to tell you all the time and over & over again that I love you and that I’m sad because you’ve gone away and that I’m not going to lose you and that I’m going to see you soon and that I want us to get married once we can and that you said yes you wanted to too. And write to me when you get this, or before you do, only write and tell me all there is to tell me. And I’ll write to tell you when I’ll be in London, and then we’ll meet, however much they try to stop us, and then I’ll be happy again and I’ll try to make you happy by not being a half wit. All my love for as long as forever & ever is Dylan
XX

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I’m going to mope about you and then I’m goi…

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