I Fellowed Sleep
by: Dylan Thomas |
Copyright law was designed to be a temporary monopoly on ideas granted to artists because we felt it would encourage them to enrich our lives with their creations.
This page used to have a very nice poem. However, we just received the email reproduced below from the agents of the estate of Dylan Thomas. It seems that the poem is still in copyright, and they would prefer that it remain a salable commodity item, instead of becoming part of our culture. Sometime in the middle of the century, if Dylan Thomas is still relevant to your life, you can make "I Fellowed Sleep" part of it.
If however, you think that copyright law has been hijacked by dirt bag lawyers and no longer serves the public interest, you might throw a few dollars at the EFF and let them know that you support their efforts to bring it back under control. But frankly, the lawyers of the copyright barons are much better funded, and will probably just keep turning the screws until "intellectual property" monopolies last forever, and your kids just assume that ideas have always been owned.
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Date: Thu, 01 Feb 2007 10:52:55 -0500
Subject: New Directions Publishing
From: Neil Otte <notte@ndbooks.com>
To: <webmaster@internal.org>
Cc: <ctenney@haroldober.com>, <ajhartnick@lawabel.com>
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January 31, 2007
To the Web Manager,
I am writing to inform you that you have posted material on your
website which is protected under copyright. New Directions Publishing Corp.,
who controls, by contract, the copyright in question, requests that you
remove all material from your website which belongs to the following works:
THE POEMS OF DYLAN THOMAS by Dylan Thomas, copyright ©1943 by New Directions
Publishing Corp
A CHILD'S CHRISTMAS IN WALES by Dylan Thomas, copyright ©1954 by New
Directions Publishing Corp
And may be found at the following URL:
http://www.internal.org/list_poems.phtml?authorID=6
We imagine you were not aware of this violation of copyright,
and expect that you will comply with our request quickly and voluntarily. I
will be checking back within two weeks time to see that these changes have
been made.
I am copying the agent for the work, and New Directions’ lawyer,
for their information.
Sincerely,
Neil Otte, New Directions Publishing
CC: AGENT:
Harold Ober Associates, Inc.
Agent: Craig Tenney
425 Madison Ave.
New York, NY 10017
ctenney@haroldober.com
CC: Lawyer
Alan Hartnick, Esq.
ajhartnick@lawabel.com
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I fellowed sleep who kissed me in the brain,
Let fall the tear of time; the sleeper’s eye,
Shifting to light, turned on me like a moon.
So, planing-heeled, I flew along my man
And dropped on dreaming and the upward sky.
I fled the earth and, naked, climbed the weather,
Reaching a second ground far from the stars;
And there we wept, I and a ghostly other,
My mothers-eyed, upon the tops of trees;
I fled that ground as lightly as a feather.
‘My fathers’ globe knocks on its nave and sings.’
‘This that we tread was, too, your fathers’ land.’
‘But we tread bears the angelic gangs,
Sweet are their fathered faces in their wings.
‘These are but dreaming men. Breathe, and they fade.’
Faded my elbow ghost, the mothers-eyed,
As, blowing on the angels, I was lost
On that cloud coast to each grave-grabbing shade;
I blew the dreaming fellows to their bed
Where still they sleep unknowing of their ghost.
Then all the matter of the living air
Raised up a voice, and, climbing on the words,
I spelt my vision with a hand and hair,
How light the sleeping on this soily star,
How deep the waking in the worlded clouds.
There grows the hours’ ladder to the sun,
Each rung a love or losing to the last,
The inches monkeyed by the blood of man.
An old, mad man still climbing in his ghost,
My fathers’ ghost is climbing in the rain. |
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