No.129. The Green Fuse. The poem by Dylan Thomas (1914-1953) had stayed with him all week. It was the first stanza in particular that he enjoyed so deeply, albeit in his despairing way. There was much in the poem he cherished::the phrase "my green age" for example (though he was no longer in it, chronologically speaking) and "wintry fever" especially (he was deeply into that, no mistake about it) The force that through the green fuse drives the flower Drives my green age; that blasts the roots of trees Is my destroyer. And I am dumb to tell the crooked rose My youth is bent by the same wintry fever Inevitably, he wanted to act the poem out, build on it,. theatricalize it. So he commissioned a gigantic green vase from a amiable ceramicist he knew, hired a comely model and quickly arranged a little tableau in which the vase was the green fuse through which the "force" (nature rampant)_would drive the flower. The model would be the flower.