In Dylan Thomas's 1935 poem ‘I, in my intricate image’, the coastal landscape is presented as ‘the grooved land rotating’ under the ‘stylus of lightning’. The emphasis on sound and light links the motif not only to recorded sound but also to film. A further reason for considering this poem in relation to film is its reference to ‘splitting the long eye open’, which, as John Ackerman and John Goodby have noted, evokes the image in Salvador Dalí and Luis Buñuel's surrealist film Un chien andalou (1928), a link borne out by the reference to medical instruments and, later on, the ‘slash of vision’. While William Tindall's 1962 reading of the poem is emphatic in interpreting the ‘ghost in metal’ as lyric's impression in the metal of printers’ type, there is also a possible reference to the silver screen. This surrealist cinematic legacy is remote from Thomas's actual engagement with film during the Second World War, during which his ‘war work’ from 1941 involved the scripting and production of wartime propaganda at Strand Films. However, Thomas's early passion for cinema informed the imagery of his poems long before his own films for the Ministry of Information. The expansive scope of Thomas's poem and its densely detailed coastal imagery is echoed in the work of his contemporary Lynette Roberts, who, though less well known than Thomas, wrote in the same landscape with a similar attentiveness to the possibilities of film. Charles Mundye has explored the friendship between the two writers, particularly from the time of Roberts's marriage to Keidrych Rhys in 1939, at which Thomas was best man. By discussing her work alongside Thomas’s, I aim to offer a broadened context for Thomas's poem and its prefiguring of his interests in film, recorded sound and representation that would intensify in the subsequent wartime years.

During the war years Roberts wrote her modernist epic Gods with Stainless Ears: A Heroic Poem in Llanybri, just across the estuary from Laugharne. In Part II of this work, a gramophone washed up on the South Wales seashore alerts the reader to the sound of the landscape, since the silent machine is juxtaposed with ‘the tidal lapping of the water’.