SOURCE: McKay, Don. “Crafty Dylan and the Altarwise Sonnets: ‘I build a flying tower and I pull it down.’” University of Toronto Quarterly 55, no. 4 (summer 1986): 375-94.

One interesting entrance to the question of Dylan Thomas's craftsmanship is offered by the place he tends to assume, or be assigned, among modern poets. Donald Davie, in Thomas Hardy and British Poetry, finds ‘tragic significance to the fact that Hardy is said to have been Dylan Thomas' favourite poet, whereas Yeats was his chosen master.’¹ This tragedy evidently lies in what Davie perceives to be the abandonment of temporality by poets like Thomas and his friend Vernon Watkins for the eternal, atemporal, and mythic. Davie is referring to Vernon Watkins's comment, in his introduction to Thomas's letters to him, that Dylan ‘understood … why I could never write a poem dominated by time, as Hardy could.’ This, Watkins goes on, ‘was also true of Dylan, though some critics have mistakenly thought to find such poems in his work. It illustrates our affinity on a deeper level: his poems spoke to me with the voice of metaphysical truth. …’²

But we might do well to ask again whether the time-bound poems of Hardy are not a stronger conditioner than most have supposed. What is often seen in Thomas as an address to a timeless world of mythic pattern is more appropriately construed as the reverse: a pulling of such still structures into the flux of temporality. Thomas's work resembles Hardy's in that it frequently brings the mechanism of the poems to the fore, using fixed stanzas with intricate rhyme and metrical schemes. He experiments with elaborate forms like the sonnet and the villanelle and does not, even in the leisurely later poems, accept the option of free verse from Lawrence and Whitman, with whom he seems to be philosophically in sympathy. Still less can one discover the influence of the vers librists or their descendants, Pound, Eliot, and the imagists. Madeness is an essential part of the character of Thomas's poems, a constant reminder of the poet's presence in the work. The comparison with Hardy is instructive: in the structures of both poets we feel an obvious arbitrariness, revealing a human craftsman using available materials, rather than the inspired recipient of ineluctable design. One thinks of ‘Author's Prologue’ with the mirror-image rhyme scheme and Thomas's comment to his publisher: ‘Why I acrosticked myself like this, don't ask me.’³ Whatever the reason, one effect of the exercise is to impress readers by flourishing his credentials as a virtuoso technician. One also thinks of the seventy-two lines in ‘I, in my intricate image’ ending with some variation of the ‘L’ sound, and the difficulty of reconciling this monotone with the intricacy mentioned in the title. Reading Thomas, as with Hardy, we are generally aware of a craftsman making the poem in time, rather than flying on viewless wings.

But it is quite apparent that there is a fundamental dissimilarity between Thomas's craft and Hardy's. Whereas Hardy is always homo faber, Thomas is more often homo ludens. Thomas's formal play, his willingness to wear rhetoric as a costume, distinguishes him from Hardy, the ‘humbler’ craftsman. Donald Davie's image of Hardy as a nineteenth-century engineer constructing a complex, open-faced mechanism holds true in a general way.⁴ Thomas is ‘crafty’ rather than humble in the control and manipulation of his craft, and the complementary image for him, which I wish to elaborate in the pages which follow, is the trickster. Let me begin by quoting the well-known, flamboyant response Thomas made to a student inquiring about his use of technical devices.

I am a painstaking, conscientious, involved, and devious craftsman in words, however unsuccessful the result so often appears, and to whatever wrong uses I may apply my technical paraphernalia. I use everything and anything to make my poems work and move in the direction I want them to: old tricks, new tricks, puns, portmanteau-words, paradox, allusion, paronomasia, paragram, catachresis, slang, assonantal rhymes, vowel rhymes, sprung rhythm. Every device there is in language is there to be used if you will. Poets have got to enjoy themselves sometimes, and the twisting and convolutions of words, the inventions and contrivances, are all part of the joy that is part of the painful, voluntary work.⁵

No doubt more than a little of the trickster's invention and contrivance has gone into the invention of this response of the poet's. One imagines Thomas leafing through a literary handbook to pick plums. In fact, the style of Thomas's response reflects this element in his ‘devious’ craftsmanship—the hoopla of a showman showing off, rather than concealing, his artfulness.

It is not difficult to discern the sly presence of the trickster everywhere in Thomas's work infecting all the other roles and voices he takes up: child, father, lover, bard, mystic, elegist. Any tendency to pomp, to institutionalized rhetoric, or indeed to any static form or concept, is undone by his saving presence. Thomas can afford to be as rhetorical and even pompously oracular as he sometimes is, because the trickster's tongue is in the poet's cheek. We might think of the narrator's ironical exposure of himself as the ‘bard on a raised hearth’⁶ in ‘After the funeral’ and the consequent doubleness we experience in reading. A tension is created between the voices of the serious mourner and the ironical observer, two dialects within the poem. Such doubleness, duplicity, is an important ingredient in any Thomas poem, managed by such tactics as polysemous references, bravura allusiveness, intricacy of form, and the teasing interplay of transparence and opacity.

Among particular figures of speech available to devious craftsmen, Thomas revels in puns and displaced clichés. Included in the list of rhetorical techniques he credits to himself in the letter quoted above are two subspecies of the pun, paronomasia and paragram, besides the pun itself. Thomas's word-play is sometimes simple (‘once below a time,’ ‘capsized field’), sometimes complex (‘Shall you turn cockwise on a tufted axle’), sometimes esoteric (Aaron's rod combining with Arianrod, mother of the mythological Dylan, in ‘A grief ago’). While we may admire and enjoy these so-called lower forms of wit, most readers have difficulty reconciling such verbal play with profound meanings. In puns, meaning is made to abandon the safe route from signifier to signified, and to reside, or more accurately to occur, in the play of signifiers, exploiting the accidental phonic coincidences between them. There is no semantic relation between Aaron's rod and Arianrod, cock and clock, cap sized and capsized, until the poet draws them together. A related trick is the transferred epithet, a fairly simple device whereby the modifiers of adjacent nouns exchange places, as in the phrase ‘sharp, enamelled eyes and spectacled claws’ (CP, 94). There is a similar impression of linguistic deformation created by Thomas's use of catachresis, that is, metaphor or implied metaphor which is abnormally stretched. We might well nominate catachresis as the paradigm figure of speech for all Thomas's obscure poems, and especially the sonnets.⁷ A catachretic metaphor registers the poet's acrobatic skill and daring along with (and sometimes to the exclusion of) the analogy proposed by the figure.

And from the windy West came two-gunned Gabriel

(CP, 82)

When the worm builds with the gold straws of venom
My nest of mercies in the rude, red tree.

(CP, 85)

Such metaphors are performances, tricks which appear as tricks, rather than secret, subtle mechanisms. In his use of such devices as puns, displaced clichés, transferred epithets, and catachresis, we can sense a willed grotesquerie in Thomas's craft, a deliberate violation of decorum. Hardy's elaborate mechanisms are compatible with the voice he develops: ruminative, rooted, honest, having a folk artist's due regard for the complicated turn or embellishment. Thomas's most extreme fancy-work seems extra to the text, like a game going on apart from the poem's sense. But, as often in recent criticism, it appears that what is from one perspective marginal, merely ornamental, or superfluous turns out, once we have shifted to a less centralist mode of reading, to function as the unsung matrix or ground-work for the whole. In general, we may say, Thomas's technical perversity is a sure sign of the trickster, the presiding deity of his work.

The element of the trickster in Thomas's writing gives him a special, privileged relationship to the mythic structures his work everywhere invokes. Within a mythological structure, the trickster is the maverick, the mischievous, unpredictable, sometimes anarchic member of the pantheon, the seed of disorder within the system, the ambassador from chaos. But he may also serve as the link between transcendent gods and mortals, between the synchronic world of myth and the historical world of events. Sometimes the trickster confers such great gifts as medicine or fire, as Nanabozho does in Ojibway myths, functioning as the medium by which power devolves from gods to men. But more often his schemes backfire, with disastrous results for himself and for mankind.

In Thomas's revision of biblical myth, it is the devil who performs the trickster's linking and transmitting function. In ‘Incarnate devil’ Satan is the initiator (or perpetrator) of time itself, stinging the static circle into wakefulness—a dubious gift, perhaps, but an essential one if man is to be independent from God, the ‘warden’ who ‘played down pardon from the heavens' hill’ (CP 46). Emphasizing the trickster's role in cosmogony itself (rather than introducing him as a belated intruder in the creation story) can be a symbolic way to stress certain features of creation: the flawed nature of existence is acknowledged as part of its essence rather than an aberration later perpetrated by man; diachronic energy is given a place at least equal to synchronic design; and creative activity is seen as primarily a subversive exercise. These are consequences evident throughout Thomas's imagery, but especially in his use of the serpent or worm as the double agent of creation and destruction. The worm is the eater of our flesh in poems such as ‘The force that through the green fuse drives the flower’ and ‘If I were tickled by the rub of love,’ and it is the creative instrument in others like ‘Before I knocked’ (the ‘fathering worm,’ CP, 8), ‘When once the twilight,’ and sonnet three of the Altarwise sequence. In that third sonnet the image of ‘the tree-tailed worm that mounted Eve’ aggressively conflates Eden's two subversive elements and combines them with the phallus. The worm's role in the sonnets extends, as we shall see, to the redemptive function foreseen at the end of the sequence. Something of this infringement on Christ's role by the trickster worm is implied in the idea of ‘mounting’ Eve. Besides crude sexual congress, this suggests the common metaphysical conceit of Christ's tree on Mount Calvary overcoming Eden's tree of knowledge, a redemptive function which here seems to belong to the worm.

But it is the role of Thomas as a poet, rather than the implications of his imagery, that I particularly wish to stress, for Thomas inhabits his mythic contexts in the same way the trickster lives in his—subversively. Embraced and even sustained by the structure, he dwells within it in a constant state of opposition, continually testing and interrogating its conventions, and attempting to steal power from the authorities, with consequences that are ambiguously creative/destructive for the sense of his poems. Shortly after the publication of the Altarwise sonnets in 1936, Thomas made some comments on a ‘misreading’ which Edith Sitwell had perpetrated in the Sunday Times. Sitwell had somewhat breezily declared that the ‘atlas-eater with a jaw for news’ (CP, 80) from sonnet one referred to ‘the violent speed and sensation-loving, horror-loving craze of modern life.’⁸ Writing to Henry Treece, Thomas took her to task for failing to take ‘the literal meaning,’ as though that were self-evident, and went on to provide his own gloss on the phrase: ‘What is this creature? It's the dog among the fairies, the rip and cur among the myths, the snapper at demons, the scarer of ghosts, the wizard's heel-chaser.’⁹ This creature within the poem is behaving as Thomas does in the exercise of his craft. Especially in the phrase I have italicized, we can hear the echo of the poet's own attitude to his mythic inheritance. For Thomas in the sonnets is himself a dog among the fairies, a rip and cur among the myths, a saboteur of inherited systems.

Critics of the Altarwise sonnets have sometimes tended to rationalize their extravagances and explain away their obliquity, as Elder Olson¹⁰ and H. H. Kleinman¹¹ do in their virtuoso exegeses. These interpretations concentrate upon some ‘metaphysical truth’ such as Vernon Watkins affirmed to be the basis of Thomas's poetry and his own. In terms of the model offered by ‘To-day, this insect,’ they give privileged status to the ageless voice's mythopoeic utterances over the voice of the temporally located, destructive artist. Interestingly, Vernon Watkins himself can take such a view of Thomas's poetics only by ignoring the thrust of some comments he made on one of Watkins's poems, ‘Call It All Names, But Do Not Call It Rest.’ Thomas wrote Watkins in March, 1938, recommending that he include a ‘destructive’ element in the poem. ‘A motive has been rarefied, it should be made common. I don't ask you for vulgarity, though I miss it; I think I ask you for a little creative destruction, destructive creation: “I build a flying tower, and I pull it down.”’¹² Such an inclusion of the trickster's demolition work within Watkins's mythopoeic would, for Thomas, have the effect of bringing the poem out of timelessness into time, making it a ‘vulgar’ event and not just a structure: ‘I can see the sensitive picking of words, but none of the strong inevitable pulling that makes a poem an event, a happening, an action perhaps, not a still life or an experience put down, placed, regulated. …’ Now that some recent critical theory has accustomed us to the phenomenon of conceptual systems which hold the seeds of their destruction, we should be able to read poems like the sonnets in a style which agrees more closely with the poet's. Because it is usual for critics to assume that Thomas is the celebrator of organically integrated existence, awareness of the trickster's perversity causes some interpretive difficulties. Critics lacking the faith of Olson, Kleinman, or Watkins often conclude that Thomas unfortunately suffered some serious lapses and wrote failures like the Altarwise sonnets. John Bayley approaches this problem when he expresses dissatisfaction with some poems which ‘seem to have no owner,’ using the figure of ventriloquism to illustrate how his ear picks up a vacuum in the rhetoric.¹³ The trickster's duplicity reduces the reader's experience of a reliable voice or presence within language, and creates reflective surfaces which defer meanings without the assurance of a point of semantic closure. Bayley, in another essay on Thomas, pauses in the middle of an ingenious exegesis of ‘Out of the sighs,’ considers his position, then gives up the exercise altogether, declaring: ‘But I have no confidence that the reader is intended to pursue these crossword clues of association: they may be simply misleading, and my tentative exegesis of the poem may bear no relation to the impression other readers may get from it.’¹⁴

But let us acknowledge that readers who have sought systems and codes within Thomas's work, including myself, have done so with some justification. In fact, we have been virtually propelled on this quest by the poet, who was fond of making broad universalizing gestures which hint, when they don't actually declare, that he possesses a symbolic system. To Pamela Hansford Johnson (for whom he acted many roles in the broad spectrum between Antichrist and the dying Keats) he intoned: ‘All around us, now and forever, a spirit is bearing and killing and resurrecting a body.’¹⁵ To Glyn Jones he declared that ‘My own obscurity is quite an unfashionable one derived … from the cosmic significance of the human anatomy.’¹⁶ Both these statements, made in 1933 and 1934 about the time the Altarwise sonnets were being composed, are somewhat qualified by the many voices which cohabit in the letters, each straining against, and undermining, its neighbours. But they are representative of the mythic and symbolic tone struck in many early poems, and particularly in the sonnets. The effect is produced, in part, by using the embracing first person, or ‘everyman’ narrator, and writing of personal existence as though it were an exemplary tale, told against a cosmic backdrop and populated with familiar names: Adam, Abaddon, Christ, Mary. These gestures serve the same function as symbol of the cross of tales at the end of ‘To-day, this insect’: they are the symbols of symbolization, indicating that a synchronic structure lies behind the many misdirections of time. We are encouraged to read Thomas's work as we might read Blake, in whose path, he told Pamela Hansford Johnson, he followed,¹⁷ or Yeats, whom he idolized.

To do so would of course be to push the trickster firmly into the background. But let us also acknowledge that we might read the sonnets under the trickster's banner, or under that of Rimbaud, his representative in Thomas's experience, and conduct a counter-interpretation stressing, at every juncture, our uncertainty among polysemous interactive images, our mounting vertigo as diverse symbolic systems are activated and released, our chronic inability to domesticate passages of non-directive syntax. Such an exercise might have the value of rectifying a critical imbalance by throwing emphasis upon the other extreme, the flying tower as raw, fragmented material rather than an erect structure. But my aim is neither to deconstruct the sonnets nor to construct another wholly integrated interpretation. Rather I wish to establish a style of reading which agrees with the poet's style of composition, using the trickster as the model of their creator, and perceiving the creation and destruction of meaning as simultaneous cognate functions. Consequently, what follows is an approach rather than a thorough treatment of the sonnets, an attempt to establish linguistic and poetic principles by pursuing hypotheses and investigating representative passages. I am after their thrust and spirit, and hope to capture some of those Barthesian pleasures we may experience if we can survive those moments of interpretive nausea when other readers like John Bayley have given up. There are, I am suggesting, embracing principles which make indeterminacy necessary; I am hopeful that an understanding of these will make it possible for us to reach and enjoy the sonnets' particular style of mischief.

It is useful to remind ourselves that Thomas was, during the thirties, a self-conscious radical who adopted a subversive stance towards all inherited structures of belief. Inspired variously by the examples of Lawrence, Blake, and Joyce, he adopts, in his letters of the period, the role of the revolutionary outsider. But since the strategy of subversion in religion, politics, social decorum, and sex extends also to his own postures, we find his most extreme theoretical statements undercut with irony or self-ridicule. After a brief polemical outburst to Pamela Hansford Johnson ending with ‘The state of the future is not to be an economic despotism or a Christian Utopia. It is the state of Functional Anarchy,’ he begins the next paragraph with ‘And a fol fol dol and a reel of cotton. So much for that.’¹⁸ Thomas cannot be fixed to doctrine, not even to the revolutionary systems like Marxism and Lawrentian sexual consciousness which he sometimes arrogated. He inhabits systems, both conventional and revisionist, in a provisional way; but he does not, like Rimbaud or Artaud, place himself nakedly outside all structures as their exemplary inquisitor.

One instance from his letters may serve to illustrate the general tendency in Thomas's thinking within systems. Defending his anatomical imagery to Pamela Hansford Johnson, he calls upon an image from Donne:

But I fail to see how the emphasizing of the body can, in any way, be regarded as hideous. The body, its appearance, death, and disease, is a fact sure as the fact of a tree. It has its roots in the same earth as the tree. The greatest description of our own ‘earthiness’ is to be found in John Donne's Devotions, where he describes man as earth of the earth, his body earth, his hair a wild shrub growing out of the land. All thoughts and actions emanate from the body. Therefore the description of thought or action—however abstruse it may be—can be beaten home by bringing it onto a physical level.¹⁹

Thomas has emptied the symbol of Donne's intention to dissuade men from carnal pursuits and to foster spirituality, and infused it with his own line of thought, oriented in the direction of D. H. Lawrence. It is typical of Thomas to use traditional sources in myth and literature wrenched from context in such an aggressive way that the aggression—the kidnapping—is itself a telling feature of the symbol in its new Thomas-controlled situation. That is, the act of allusion is itself part of the symbol's signification, registering the poet's bold determination to dislodge the symbol from its embracing structure and bend to his own will a former member of an authoritative system. Whether Thomas invents his own system or not, his style of allusion serves notice that he will be no slave to another man's, even when he has stolen pieces of it.

This aggressive orientation towards precursors may be contrasted to Eliot's restraint in The Waste Land. Quotations from other authors are guests in that poem, and are generally allowed to retain the voices in which they spoke originally. Although they function within The Waste Land under Eliot's ultimate control, their original senses are not violated, and they are permitted to resonate fully within themselves. They often appear with enough of their original contexts (‘You! hypocrite lecteur!—mon semblable,—mon frère!’) that their spirit as literary languages is retained and they can function as dialects within the multi-lingual poem. By such gestures Eliot adds to his local and intertextual meanings the signals of homage to the original text and reverence to tradition itself. Thomas, as trickster, does not wish to inherit anything: he wants to lay claims, to seize, steal, to establish the rule of his individual talent over all constituents of his poetry, even, one senses, over language itself. His allusive strategy denies his sources the ability to ring the clear note of themselves or establish firm links with tradition. Instead they are swallowed by the teeming imagery, gathered quickly into the syntactical flow and forbidden any nostalgia for the lost context. There is a general process of vulgarizing the traditional source, the element Thomas missed in Vernon Watkins's poetry. The expression ‘a dog among the fairies’ sums up the poet's relationship to the élite. And in its context in sonnet one the phrase is itself a dog among fairies, in the sense that it is an uncouth, mundane expression (a slur on homosexuals is suggested) mingling familiarly with such dignitaries as Abaddon, Adam, and Christ.

Thomas inherits the sonnet with a typical gesture of independence, imposing his personal stamp on the old form by placing the sestet first in each poem. One might wish to argue that choosing the sonnet sequence in the first place was a rather conventional decision. However, something of Thomas's technical perversity emerges when we consider the anomaly that Thomas is handling materials of an apparently epic scale within this condensed mode, where the poet is generally free to write lyrically and subjectively with few of the epic writer's responsibilities to narrative coherence or established tradition. The choice of form, then, is a first step in the subjectification of myth, and necessitates such compacting and combining of its mythological constituents that the private integrity of each is seriously compromised, as in Tokyo subway cars during rush hour. The very virtuosity of Thomas's allusiveness within these close quarters guarantees that no one mythic system—Christianity, the Heracles cycle, astrology, the Freudian family romance—can achieve dominion as the organizing strain: in a film crowded with famous actors there is no star, and more power is reserved by the director for himself. When such nominees as Christ or Heracles are proposed for hero, the interpreter is forced to postulate such modifications, inversions, and hybridizations of his persona that his self-identity becomes most problematic. My father-in-law had the same watch for forty years, during which time, as he was fond of pointing out, he replaced the crystal, the face, the strap and the escapement several times each.

Quite apart from Thomas's characteristic style of allusion to external sources, the home-grown symbols in the sonnets generally wear the stamp of their manufacture, that quality of madeness discussed earlier: ‘My camel's eyes will needle through the shroud,’ ‘Adam, time's joker, on a witch of cardboard,’ ‘Pin-legged on pole-hills with a black medusa.’ Much of the aesthetic interest in lines like these lies in watching a virtuoso bricoleur or handyman making a rickety structure out of scraps. Even when the materials derive from mythic contexts, he treats them as though they were scraps: Adam can enter the deck of cards as the joker, the trickster of that context; Medusa as goddess or jelly-fish shows up on some pole-hills suggestive of Calvary. Christ and Egyptian funerary rites (sonnet nine) exist democratically in the same milieu with a hellfire preacher, pirates, Rip Van Winkle, references to novels by Henry Miller, card tricks, and sexual puns. One of the chief effects of this medley-making for the extensive biblical imagery is the neutralization of the moral imperatives of religion. Even Rushworth Kidder, who sees Thomas as a religious poet, considers that the sonnets, although packed with biblical imagery, exclude ‘religious commitment.’²⁰ There is in fact a carnival atmosphere in the sonnets, a sense of illusion and flamboyance, as each item declares itself, like an item in a Mardi Gras parade, momentous and momentary. Since the syntax here, as in ‘To-day, this insect’ is generally permissive and sometimes quite dissolute, there is little to check or organize the tumble and flow. As we read, the unregulated phrases tend to rub and mingle promiscuously, creating a reading experience that is both exciting and disturbing.

A test run through a particular passage in sonnet two will provide examples of this behaviour.

The horizontal cross-bones of Abaddon,
You by the cavern over the black stairs,
Rung bone and blade, the verticals of Adam,
And, manned by midnight, Jacob to the stars.

(CP, 80)

In this passage it is difficult to settle on a subject (crossbones? You? verticals? Rung, bone and blade?) or an active verb (Rung as ungrammatical for ‘rang,’ and deformed, as it is in sonnet three, to fit on Jacob's ladder? Jacob meaning ‘to climb spiritually’?). There is a good deal of local and immediate excitement generated by the obvious associations and the potential relationships an indeterminate syntax allows: the destroying angel, pirate's flag and cave, swordfighting, Adam's aspirations, and Jacob's ladder. These are further riches to be experienced as we play the ladder against the ‘black stairs,’ and discover them both to be composed of vertical and horizontals, which react with images in other sonnets. Aren't these the elements of the cross from sonnet eight, and of the globe itself, seen as a ladder of latitude and longitude in sonnet three?

We rung our weathering changes on the ladder,
Said the antipodes, and twice spring chimed.

(CP, 81)

Global verticals and horizontals may also throw us back to the closing lines of the first sonnet, where the two tropics are presented as bed-mates of the long world's gentleman.

I am the long world's gentleman, he said,
And share my bed with Capricorn and Cancer.

(CP, 80)

Our minds can range freely amid such associations (other readers will have their own sets, and mine may have shifted next week) because they are not directed by the syntax, and the corresponding thematic phenomena—narrative and argument—do not speak compellingly. To put this in linguistic terms: the syntagmatic function of words-in-sequence, their local usage (which we may imagine as a horizontal axis), does not place the normal regulatory stress on their vertical paradigmatic functions, their universalizing associations. As a reading proceeds, assuming that we allow the seductions of this craft to occur, these associations may tend to converge towards synthesis. We may, for example, begin to see a unified symbol in the images of the figure on the ladder, the long world's gentleman stretched on the globe, and Christ on the cross. We may move further to intellectualize this as a common theme of aspiration and ascent, figured in the ladder/cross/latitudes and longitudes, all of them made by combining Adam's verticals with Abaddon's rungs of suffering, a paradigmatic emblem of the human struggle uniting Genesis and Revelation. But the strong centralizing symbol which would support this hypothesis (the way the cross of tales/tree of stories supplies assurance of mythic integrity in ‘To-day, this insect’) is not provided, and we are left instead with an elegant and witty possibility, uncertain as to whether the wit and elegance are the poet's or our own. It is at this point in the interpretive process that roads diverge. Do we remain with the play of imagery or move to a hypothetical bounding structure? It is very tempting to read beyond the poem, supplying such connections as syntax, argument, and dominant symbol as though the poet had absent-mindedly omitted them. In fact, it seems to be a general rule in reading that our desire for integration increases in proportion to the poet's refusal to satisfy it, a phenomenon which can lead to such brilliant fantasies as the star chart which Elder Olson proposes as a key to the sonnets.

In the sonnets, all integrating forces are weakened, and we are thrown back into a play of images. Even with the trope of metaphor itself, conventions are missing which would have assisted us towards an integrated reading. Thomas seldom uses similes or metaphors in their basic rhetorical formulations, which would indicate clearly that phrase b is a trope for phrase a and so may be taken for it. Without such indications, we often find ourselves uncertain whether phrase b is an extension of phrase a, or whether a wholly new character or function has entered the fray. A typically ambiguous apposition might work like this: ‘The bald queen of dream, the knave of knives, oiling the bloody oyster.’ Are there two creatures oiling the oyster, one bald and one knavish, or do we have a single, bisexual, regal, knife-wielding oiler of oysters to contend with? This is a simplified rendition of the problem in sonnet one, where the reader is bound to be unsure whether phrases introducing Abaddon, the dog among the fairies, and the atlas-eater should function as tropes for one another, as tropes for the gentleman, or as separate characters.

Altarwise by owl-light in the half-way house
The gentleman lay graveward with his furies;
Abaddon in the hangnail cracked from Adam,
And, from his fork, a dog among the fairies,
The atlas-eater with a jaw for news,
Bit out the mandrake with to-morrow's scream.

(CP, 80)

Are all of these new faces on the quasi-mythic scene or, perhaps, all phrases we may substitute for the gentleman? Are Abaddon, the dog, and the atlas-eater all epithets for one unnamed character? Whose fork is it? And so on.

Corresponding to the relational difficulties encountered in the sonnets, there is an insistence upon substantiveness, upon each thing being established in itself. Without relational guideposts (syntax, theme, narrative, metaphorical relationship) each item in sonnet one's sestet proposes itself to be independent, symbolic, and important. This effect is increased by the ubiquity of the definite article, which turns images into identifying epithets or titles. In the first sonnet alone we have the half-way house, the gentleman, the atlas-eater, the mandrake, the heaven's egg, the half-way winds, the windy salvage, and the long world's gentleman. If we experimentally replace all those definite articles with indefinite ones (or, where appropriate, omit the article altogether) then read through the sonnet, the mythic portentousness, the conspicuous symbolhood of its constituents is greatly reduced. To call Babe Ruth ‘a sultan of swat’ or Lana Turner ‘a sweater girl’ would be to reduce them to the rest of us, to suggest that any of us could, with luck and practice, achieve those levels of competence. Identifying epithets are linguistic institutions, and do not need to participate in ordinary, accidental time, accumulating significance diachronically; they are already archetypes, packed with the protein of meaning, full of their own essences. Consequently, even when the reference is obscure, such items claim the stature of myth; we feel that the fake gentleman, the bagpipe-breasted ladies, the tall fish, the ladder, and the lamped calligrapher are important, but we're not sure why, and this places additional stress on the reading. In general, the emphatic nominative values in the poem encourage us to look for a stable structure, while the weak relational values frustrate that pursuit, suggesting that the flying tower exists only in fragmentary form.

One way we might perceive pattern in the sonnets without risking over-reading is to displace emphasis from narrative to style and observe that their real hero is the poet's craft itself. This, however, would not acknowledge those unmistakable signals of mythic narration, signals that the sonnets are either telling, or pretending to tell, a story of universal application. An hypothesis closer to the spirit of the poem is that the hero is in some way an incarnation of that craft—a trickster. But this, too, has its problems. How would a trickster be likely to appear? To ask this question is to probe a paradox. ‘The trickster’ is itself an identifying epithet which I have been quietly using as a convenient means of surrounding a set of deconstructive phenomena; it is a personification of elusiveness which gives it misleading substance. The interpretive problem which confronts us now is, I think, parallel to the problem Thomas faced while composing the sonnets. In order to delineate his protagonist accurately he had to avoid delineating him too boldly; an obvious trickster, like a conspicuous spy, would be a contradiction in terms.

One way Thomas handles this difficulty is to problematize the idea of character itself. We have already observed how Thomas's strategy of ambiguous apposition leaves us uncertain as to whether we are dealing with one character or several. A related, more dynamic, strategy is the crossing of opposed characters, an effect which is created by making them share attributes or functions. In ‘To-day, this insect’ and ‘I see the boys of summer’ we can observe struggles between figures of authority and subversive youth. The ageless voice and the destructive artist fill these roles in the former poem, the old men and the boys of summer in the latter. Both these poems reach a form of synthesis between the destruction that breeds obscurity and time-honoured values of tradition. The synthesis is implied in the cross of tales behind the fabulous curtain, and overtly stated in the closing section of ‘I see the boys of summer,’ which acts openly as the third stage of a dialectical triad.

I am the man your father was.
We are the sons of flint and pitch.
O see the poles are kissing as they cross.

(CP, 3)

The simultaneity that is described by these figures of synthesis, ‘the cross,’ is acted out in the Altarwise sonnets. In the first sonnet we meet the antagonists—the narrator's ‘I’ and the long world's gentleman—and immediately discover that their beings and functions are intertwined by linguistic action. The long world's gentleman, who proclaims himself boldly to the narrator in the last lines, is also known as ‘the gentleman,’ and as ‘that gentleman of wounds’ in the first sonnet, and as ‘the wounded whisper,’ ‘the fake gentleman,’ ‘the long wound,’ ‘my gentle wound,’ and ‘my long gentleman’ in those which follow. To construe a single being in that string of aliases (he is also known by the synecdoche ‘old cock from nowhere’ in sonnets one and six, and may be ‘the black ram’ of sonnet three) is of course to brook a considerable attenuation of the idea of character. We are persuaded to accept some latitude in the notion of persons, running through linguistic permutations of the words ‘long,’ ‘gentleman,’ and ‘wound,’ in order to achieve a measure of coherence.

As these antagonists are introduced they are already crossing. In the difficult opening lines, two contrary narratives compete for dominance in the same syntactical structure: the gentleman creates the child/narrator, while he is simultaneously destroyed by his creation. In the act of reading, this ambiguity functions like those figure-ground puzzles in which one sees either a vase or two faces, depending on one's point of view. As noted above, this ambiguity is due in part to the open relation of phrases in apposition. Here are the lines again.

Altarwise by owl-light in the half-way house
The gentleman lay graveward with his furies;
Abaddon in the hangnail cracked from Adam,
And, from his fork, a dog among the fairies,
The atlas-eater with a jaw for news,
Bit out the mandrake with to-morrow's scream.

(CP, 80)

It is crucial to this crossing that ‘his fork’ can be read as the gentleman's loins or as the child's birth as a divided being, the sense in which Thomas uses the word ‘fork’ in ‘In the beginning.’²¹ It is also crucial that the mandrake serve not only as a symbol of the gentleman's phallus but also as an homunculus representing the body of the child. Hence the gentlemen ‘bites out’ the child's body in procreation; the child being created bites out the gentleman's phallus: the two acts are simultaneous both imagistically and syntactically. Abaddon, the destroying angel, and Adam, infant man and the father of mankind, may then be seen to represent functions filled simultaneously by the gentleman and the child/narrator, and not as the fixed symbolic identities of either one.

When we read this way, remaining open to possibility, exploring illicit syntactical and narrative deformations without relinquishing our native desire for overall sense, we may come to view characters as moments in the ongoing process, beings upon which the actions of the poem work to wean them away from substance into energy. Characters become events; the balance shifts from nouns performing actions to actions using nouns as their agents. In a simple poem like ‘The force that through the green fuse drives the flower,’ Thomas can lay out modes of simultaneity in a form that is syntactically rigorous: there is a natural force which is at once creative and destructive; and this force affects the narrator equally with the physical world.

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.

(CP, 10)

The syntactical formula established by this stanza is used, with only slight variation, in all four. This regular, explanatory syntax carries its own signal. The force is tamed by language which seems to hold and dispense it in perfectly cadenced, uniform structures. There are few such formal or syntactical checks in the sonnets, where the energies native to language, amplified by the associative relations, often seem to propagate without natural enemies.

The antagonists who cross in the opening sestet of sonnet one are permitted by the octave's regular syntax to emerge as relatively distinct and independent figures. It is as though there were an absolute simultaneity of being during the creative act, a moment of pure energy which sweeps away stable identity. In the aftermath the narrative ‘I’ is clearly seen to be a child in his cradle, and the long world's gentleman is developed in a series of epithets culminating in his self-declaration in the last two lines.

Then, penny-eyed, that gentleman of wounds,
Old cock from nowheres and the heaven's egg,
With bones unbuttoned to the half-way winds,
Hatched from the windy salvage on one leg,
Scraped at my cradle in a walking word
That night of time under the Christward shelter:
I am the long world's gentleman, he said,
And share my bed with Capricorn and Cancer.

(CP, 80)

Distinctive attributes are suggested here: the long world's gentleman is a creator; he is wounded, in all likelihood by the child who ‘bit out the mandrake’; and he seems to be a cosmological man, something akin to the sun-hero Elder Olson sees voyaging between the tropics.²² On the one hand, these epithets drawn from various symbolic systems substantiate the figure; but on the other they create new problems because the attributes are contradictory. He is both a Christ-like figure, as reinforced in the crucifixion which occurs in sonnet eight, and a much lustier fertility figure, an ‘Old cock’ who shares his bed with two cosmic figures. The phrase ‘Old cock from nowheres and the heaven's egg’ dramatizes the problem, since it blatantly contradicts itself: wandering bum from a negative matrix like a character by Samuel Beckett, or legatee of the gods, hatched from the heaven's egg like Castor and Pollux? Two alien philosophies, two attitudes to structure, two relationships to tradition, are implied. Adding to the sense of the old cock as sexual athlete working against his Christ-like qualities is the implicit reference to the work of Henry Miller, whose notorious tropics novels were favourites of Thomas's. (‘Lament,’ the poetic biography of an ‘old ram rod’ who is gradually reduced from virility to domesticated entropy, was originally dedicated to Miller.) By having his figure ‘hatched from the windy salvage on one leg,’ Thomas wittily plays the Christ-like and reprobate elements at once: a crucified man is one-legged (cf ‘pinlegged on pole-hills’ in sonnet five); but so also is a pirate like Long John Silver, the fictional trickster who hatches from several windy salvages, and whose name may be echoed by the long world's gentleman. Perhaps the method of characterization, the bricolage, and the diversity of attributes are of greatest significance here. By creating such strains, Thomas insists on the supremacy of his intention over those encoded in the source materials. We can, I think, see in the combination of saviour and reprobate, of victim and aggressor, outsider from nowheres and insider from the heaven's egg, Thomas's own version of the trickster inhabiting his own myth with subversive élan.

Before the long world's gentleman crosses with the narrator again in sonnet eight, we may (again assuming some elasticity in ‘character’) identify him as an active agent in sonnets four and five. As everywhere in the sonnets, these contexts are capable of provoking whole cabbalas of speculative explication. I will attempt to confine mine to the appearance of the gentleman in relation to the narrator. In sonnet four there is a ‘wounded whisper’ who is nagged by the narrator's sharp, unanswerable questions. We might see these as indications that the narrator is probing the conditions of life, interrogating existence in a way which fits the trickster's methods and will be recognized by anyone who has survived a five-year-old.

What is the metre of the dictionary?
The size of genesis? the short spark's gender?
Shade without shape? the shape of Pharaoh's echo?
(My shape of age nagging the wounded whisper).
Which sixth of wind blew out the burning gentry?
(Questions are hunchbacks to the poker marrow).

(CP, 81-2)

These questions have the enigmatic bite of cosmic riddles or koans, answerable, if at all, only in metaphors which extend conventional notions of reality. Such riddling is a linguistic probing for loopholes, an undoing of the ordinary by the poetic consciousness. It is aimed at the parent representing the established order—the long world's gentleman now recast as gentry, or Pharaoh—and seems to contribute to his decline.

When the gentleman appears in sonnet five we may well ask whether Thomas has moved from composite portraiture to the splitting of characters. Is the ‘fake gentleman in suit of spades’ another version of the figure, or his inauthentic surrogate, an impostor?

And from the Windy West came two-gunned Gabriel,
From Jesu's sleeve trumped up the king of spots,
The sheath-decked jacks, queen with a shuffled heart;
Said the fake gentleman in suit of spades,
Black-tongued and tipsy from salvation's bottle.

(CP, 82)

The passage speaks about, and demonstrates, the craft of illusions—sleight of hand in poker, tall tales in religion and the Wild West. Thomas displaces the biblical characters to the saloon where they lose their traditional attributes and play dubious poker. What's the king of spots doing up Jesu's sleeve, in either a card-playing or a theological context? But beyond the usual image-play and mythic dislocation there is a duplicity to the narrative structure. Thomas withholds the important news that the first three lines are spoken by the fake gentleman, surely no reliable source, until the fourth line, with the result that we are likely to read them first as ‘gospel,’ then as ‘pseudo-gospel’ or windy religiosity.²³ Analysed synchronically, the passage seems to be a tale within a tale within a tale. The fake gentleman, himself drunk on religion, told a story about two-gunned Gabriel, who was involved in a card game in which the cards played mysteriously allegorical roles. There is no firm ground in these lines; nothing is what it seems; no one is bona fide. The narrator, having identified the gentleman as a fake, turns away from his religiosity to embark on a sea voyage which is filled with surreal adventures strongly suggestive of sexuality.

Interaction between the protagonists reaches a climax in sonnet eight, where there is a crucifixion, and a subsequent spreading of blessings of mankind. But more importantly for those interested in the subversions of craft, there is an interpretative problem arising out of mythological anomaly. The sonnet clearly contains a narrator and a crucified victim, who is addressed by the narrator as ‘Jack Christ,’ and whom we may identify as the long world's gentleman because the Mary figure is called the ‘long wound's woman.’ But this sorting of personae leaves the narrator, and not the crucified Christ-figure, making the large gestures which embrace humanity. It is the narrator who suffers the heaven's children through his heartbeat; and it is from his nipples that the rainbow which surrounds the globe originates.

This was the sky, Jack Christ, each minstrel angle
Drove in the heaven-driven of the nails
Till the three-coloured rainbow from my nipples
From pole to pole leapt round the snail-waked world.
I by the tree of thieves, all glory's sawbones,
Unsex the skeleton this mountain minute,
And by this blowclock witness of the sun
Suffer the heaven's children through my heartbeat.

(CP, 84)

A consistent religious interpretation cannot tolerate the usurpation of Christ's role by the narrator. H. H. Kleinman admits the difficulty with the speakers, then presents a reading which preserves the integrity of the mythic paradigm by splitting the narrative voice and assuming the narrator's identification with Christ.

It is difficult at times to determine who the speaker is in the sonnet. The ‘Jack Christ,’ for example, is confusing because it sounds like direct address. But Thomas has mixed pronouns and shifted tenses before; and the only conclusion I can draw is that his identification with Christ in this sonnet is complete … In the seventh line [the first in the octave, quoted above] it is Thomas who speaks for a moment, in the role of guide, to point out the place of the Crucifixion; but, before the line is ended, Christ speaks again.²⁴

This is one way out of the difficulty, although the strain of the interpretive doctrine on the poetic action is intense. Kleinman, and most other critics, are skirting an outrage which is, if we read along the lines we've been following, close to the heart of Thomas's poetics: the narrator, ‘all glory's sawbones,’ unsexes the skeleton, and, with this symbol of potency in hand, is able to spread divine power to humanity. ‘This blowclock,’ following hard upon the unsexing, may surely be read as the gentleman's genitalia; this form of apotheosis was prefigured by the action of biting out the mandrake during the creative act. The word brings with it an association which reinforces the idea of a fertility symbol: a blowclock is a dandelion head gone to seed, and ‘blowing the clock’ means dispersing the seeds with a puff of breath.²⁵ Thomas is violating the integrity of the Christian myth by moving the redemptive function from the Christ-figure to the narrator and by superimposing a fertility rite on the crucifixion. His actions as a poet are equivalent to the actions of the narrator: both are stealing power from the authorities, and both insist that it be disseminated within the temporal sphere.

It is frequently observed that the later Thomas envisioned a more harmonious universe, while he modified the furious dialectics of these early poems towards the relaxed and easy lyrics of the forties. In sonnet ten, such a vision is projected as a final resolution to his strategies of creative destruction and destructive creation. Significantly enough, Thomas presents an image of two ‘bark towers’ in a flying garden, an edenic context which will come about when the creative and destructive forces unite, and the poet is, presumably, not perpetually dismantling his flying towers.

Green as beginning, let the garden diving
Soar, with its two bark towers, to that Day
When the worm builds with the gold straws of venom
My nest of mercies in the rude, red tree.

(CP, 85)

The trickster worm, ubiquitous in Thomas's imagery and craft, is to be the active agent in bringing about this marvellous upper-case Day, making a nest in the cross out of venom. Providing the vehicle for the worm's activities is, as we've observed, one motive of Thomas's poetics. We should also note, in this sonnet, that the narrator is keeping this climactic vision suspended while continuing to practise an art which subverts and recreates inherited materials, essentially the same suspension of closure as the bardic poet maintains in ‘After the funeral.’ The ‘ship-racked’ gospel and the ‘blown word’ indicate that he is dealing with the scraps and salvaged fragments rather than whole doctrines. And he throws the flying garden up out of a very obscure context which (whatever else it does) reforms biblical materials in an aggressively irreverent manner.

Let the first Peter from a rainbow's quayrail
Ask the tall fish swept from the bible east,
What rhubarb man peeled in her foam-blue channel
Has sown a flying garden round that sea-ghost?

(CP, 85)

Is Peter asking impertinent questions of Christ? Is the flying garden created by the mating of Mary and a rhubarb man? That the last, apocalyptic images should owe their being to this obscure context (the garden is sown here) is entirely appropriate. For these are still the tactics of the trickster, the tactics of the worm, that architect of human paradise.

Notes

1. Donald Davie, Thomas Hardy and British Poetry (New York 1972), p 4.

2. Vernon Watkins, Introduction, in Letters to Vernon Watkins (London 1957), pp 17-18.

3. Dylan Thomas, Selected Letters, ed Constantine FitzGibbon (London 1966), p 377. In ‘Author's Prologue’ the first line rhymes with the last one, the second with the penultimate line, the third with the antepenultimate, and so on, until the mid-point, where there is a rhyming couplet.

4. Davie, p 17.

5. Dylan Thomas, ‘Notes on the Art of Poetry,’ in Twentieth-Century Poetry and Poetics, ed Gary Geddes (Toronto 1976), p 593.

6. Dylan Thomas, Collected Poems 1934-1952 (New York 1956), p 96. All further references to Collected Poems appear in the text abbreviated as CP.

7. Appropriately, a line from ‘Vision and Prayer’ is used to illustrate modern catachresis in the Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics.

8. See Henry Treece, Dylan Thomas: ‘Dog among the Fairies’ (London 1949), appendices 1 and 2, pp 145-50.

9. Selected Letters, pp 198-9. Emphasis added.

10. Elder Olson, The Poetry of Dylan Thomas (Chicago 1954), pp 63-89.

11. H. H. Kleinman, The Religious Sonnets of Dylan Thomas (Berkeley and Los Angeles 1963).

12. Letters to Vernon Watkins, p 38.

13. John Bayley, ‘Chains and the Poet,’ in Dylan Thomas: New Critical Essays, ed Walford Davies (London 1972), p 65.

14. John Bayley, ‘Dylan Thomas,’ in Dylan Thomas: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed C. B. Cox (Englewood Cliffs 1966), p 151.

15. Selected Letters, p 84.

16. Ibid, p 97.

17. Ibid, p 23.

18. Ibid, p 139.

19. Ibid, p 48.

20. Rushworth M. Kidder, Dylan Thomas: The Country of the Spirit (Princeton 1973), p 136. In this he opposes H. H. Kleinman, who interprets the sonnets as a ‘deeply moving statement of religious perplexity concluding in spiritual certainty’ (Kleinman, p 10).

21. The substance forked that marrowed the first sun;

    And, burning ciphers on the round of space,

    Heaven and hell mixed as they spun. (CP, 27)

    One might also observe that the fork might be seen as Satan's pitchfork, since ‘the gentleman’ is a common epithet for the devil.

22. Olson, p 69.

23. The semi-colon after line 3 seems to be an overt case of syntactical mystification; it does cast some doubt on the view that the fake gentleman is speaking.

24. Kleinman, p 95.

25. Peter Revell, ‘Altarwise by owl-light,’ Alphabet, number 8 (June 1964), 56-7.