Reading Dylan Thomas

Because the "fuse" still burns and the flower still blooms

One of the best answers I’ve ever given to my kids when they’ve asked a question of me has been this: “I don’t know.” It not only has freed me of knowing, making it clear that Dad doesn’t have all the answers, but it also has made the important point that it’s perfectly okay to not have the answer, the solution, the definitive explanation.

It took me a bit to learn this. I’m happy I did. Not only because it’s true, but because it’s essential.

I think of this now as I read again, as I have many times, one of Dylan Thomas’ most famous poems. The collection of his poems sits on my lap in the chair beside the window. It is early morning. Still dark. And there before me are those beautiful words:

The force that through the green fuse drives the flower.

The poem is about time. It is time that makes a flower bloom but also what makes it wilt. That “force” is life, moving through the “green fuse”—the flower’s stem—allowing it to flourish, to ignite, yet, in time, the force is no longer and the flower dies. Time gives and takes away.

Thomas wrote this poem when he was 19 years old. How such a young man can see life so profoundly can’t be explained. There is no answer.

Another great poet, Rainer Maria Rilke wrote about time and answers in one of his famous letters noted in the book Letters to a Young Poet.

I beg you, to have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language. Don’t search for the answers, which could not be given to you now, because you would not be able to live them. And the point is to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer.

I’ve come to realize that the unknowing of things is what drives creative work.

Art is an act of faith, the faith that somehow, through the work and time, meaning and purpose will emerge. Through artistic time you ask questions that cannot be answered. Why and to whom am I writing this song? This story? This poem? And why, over all this time of creating, have I not given it all up? What on earth is the reason I do any of it?

So many times, artistic work has zero answers. The creation comes from nowhere, magically appearing, emerging from the universe like a mystery unfolding. No matter how small my attempts are to reach out to the world with some meaningful communication, I must believe that it is ultimately useful, that I know its “answer” is there—somewhere, hidden—waiting to be revealed, that it has a purpose.

But the truth is, I don’t know if it does. The time put in may never produce the answer.

Rilke was right. Artistic work is not about finding answers, it’s about asking questions. The questions are what drives art and what makes art worthwhile. “Live the questions,” Rilke wrote, even though, as Thomas suggested, time will at some point diminish the “force” that gives art its bloom. What is born will die. Time does that. And in our time on earth, art asks those unanswerable questions: Is God real? Does love exist? Will infinity ever be understood? Why are we here?

Whether my creative work, or the work of any artist, writer, painter, sculpture or musician is worth it can never be truly answered. Van Gogh never knew the full worth of his art. Not it’s monetary value, but its value to connect. But the answers are not important. Do the work no matter what because time is always running out.

The most enduring words of Thomas’ poem come at the very end.

And I am dumb to tell a weather's wind, how time has ticked a heaven round the stars.

We are powerless to comprehend life, the profound concept of here and now, of existence, of death. Thomas is clear about one thing. Time moves in only one direction, yet it is unknowable, just like the answers to all the questions.

Long ago, I had dogeared the page where Thomas’ great poem is found, and I dogear it again, and return the book to the coffee table as the eastern horizon turns gold and blue in the sunrise, and time simply travels on.

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David W. Berner is the author of several books of award-winning fiction and memoir. His latest, Daylight Saving Time: The power of growing older is available now. His debut poetry collection, Garden Tools is due out in October, 2025 from Finishing Line Press. His novella, American Moon will be published by Regal House Publishing in 2026.