Adapting quickly to their way of life at Laugharne, Dylan settled back into his familiar routine: pottering in the mornings, which included reading, perhaps writing the odd letter, and, almost every day a visit to his parents, (they had now been installed in part of a Georgian house on the main street called the Pelican), completing the crossword with his father. At midday he would drink at the Brown’s Hotel to catch–up on the town’s latest gossip, then return to the work shed from two until seven o’clock to write or think or sleep, drowsy with beer on warm summer afternoons: to Hecter MacIver, Dylan wrote, ‘My study, atelier, or bard’s bothy, roasts on a cliff-top.’ Alone, in his ‘water and tree room’, above the tidal muds or estuary waters, changing weathers and skies, sheltered by the fig tree and willowy birches, he could sometimes be heard reciting a work, over and over, rescuing the words, counting the syllables, sounding rhymes. As Caitlin recalled: "When I think of that concentrated muttering and mumbling and intoning, the realms of discarded lists of rhyming words, the innumerable repetitions and revisions and how at the end of an intensive five hour stretch (from 2-7) prompt as clockwork, Dylan would come out very pleased with himself saying, he had done a good days work, and present me proudly with one or two or three perhaps fiercely belaboured lines".

In his, as Thomas told Princess Caetani in 1952, ‘wordsplashed hut’, the walls were pinned with photos, reproductions and magazine cuttings of Lord Byron, Walt Whitman, Louis MacNeice, W. H. Auden, William Blake, a painting by Modigliani, picaresque nudes, serial specials from Picture Post and similar magazines, rhyming lists and word lists of alliterations. On the main table there were many drafts of work in progress; for Thomas often wrote over a hundred versions of a poem in these last ‘seathumbed leaves’ of complex composition. Thomas was a prolific letter writer (over 1100 have been collected) and drafts and letters, with his ubiquitous notes and funny little drawings. Plus there would have been a large English dictionary and certainly Roget’s Thesaurus, and undoubtedly something by Dickens, plus latest issues of literary magazines such as Keidrych Rhys’ Wales, Cyril Connolly’s Horizon and Princess Caetani’s Botteghe Oscure. Thomas through the east window could see giant ‘Jack’ the ferryman working between Laugharne and the ferry path opposite, beside Black Scar, up on the hill beyond was Llanybri; across were the fields and farms of Pentowin looking through the other window, out over the estuary in the near distance is Wharley Point on the Llansteffan peninsular, and where on a fine and crystal day he would see Worm’s Head, Rhosili on the Gower silhouetted in the far distance: the distant Gower reminding him of Vernon Watkins and Bert Trick and their discussions there in the 1930’s on what was to become Under Milk Wood. Looking south from the side window, rose Sir John’s Hill, behind the mudflats and tussocky foreshore of the lower town.

Dylan was very affected by what he saw and on his very first visit to Laugharne in May of 1934 with the poet Glyn Jones, on a "fallen angel of a day" when "in the very far distance, near the line of the sky, three women and a man are gathering cockles. The oyster-catchers are protesting in hundreds around them." Back in Laugharne again, he now had a birds-nest view from his writing shed, and began writing new poems: completing Over Sir John’s Hill:

Over Sir John’s Hill
The hawk on the fire hangs still;
In a hoisted cloud, at drop of dusk, he pulls his claws
And gallows, up the rays of his eyes the small birds of the bay
And the shrill child’s play
Wars
Of the sparrows and such who swansing, dusk, in wrangling hedges
And blithely they squawk
To fiery tyburn over the wrestle of elms until
The flash the noosed hawk
Crashes, and slowly the fishing holy stalking heron
In the river Towy below bows his tilted headstone.

Though Dylan’s optimism was short-lived, for shortly thereafter, his circumstances were to change and times became precarious financially and emotionally tumultuous — yet he accomplished numerous broadcasts, wrote some of his most acclaimed poems for In Country Sleep published in the USA in 1952, all containing motifs of writing from the writing shed, and includes: "Over Sir John’s Hill", "Poem on his Birthday", "Lament", "In the White Giant’s Thigh", and probably his most famous poem of all "Do not go gentle into that good night", secretly written for his father dying of cancer. This moving villanelle is regularly read at funerals, such as Seamus Heaney’s reading of the poem for Ted Hughes’ funeral in 1997. From 1952 until Thomas left in the sunny October of 1953, time at the writing shed disappeared into the four American Tours and on the short visits back it became a retreat from a jealous Caitlin and a dreaming scheming ‘stilted-house’ to write his secret love letters, his long letters, his begging letters... ...or Organ Morgan’s "finger, not his own, in his mouth’ or Gossamer Beynon’s "my foxy darling" dreamy thoughts...

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