All That I Owe the Fellows of the Grave

Thomas dispenses with the conventions of the poetic line—that is, the reliable patterning-dynamic of stressed and unstressed syllables that have, since antiquity, imbued poetry’s recitation with its reassuring percussive feel.

Language here is its own music and its own justification. The syllables play one against the other in a rhythmic free-association between the tight architecture of classical poetry and the liberation into absolute free verse that will come a generation after Thomas’s death. The first stanza‘s first six lines scan with a clean four-beat count, stressed and unstressed; the closing three lines work against that anticipated meter as they move to a five-beat count, slowing down the meter to correspond to the poem’s sobering meditation on the joys and sorrows inherited through flesh and blood.

Thomas then creates a poetic line not by the metrical foot but by the patterns of individual syllables. The poem’s resistance to monotonous recitation reflects the complexity of its argument. The lines are tightly metered—this is not free verse—but they are not tightly patterned, giving the poem its dramatic immediacy. It does not sound like over-polished poetic lines but rather mimics the intuitive rhythms of actual speech.

In addition, Thomas uses varied wordplay to create rhythm and rhyme, each line like an individual line of music. He works long vowels against clipped consonants as well as rich sibilant consonants against hard-edged vowels; he strings together alliterative phrases; he uses enjambment, leaving select lines unpunctuated, thus opening them to move easily and cleanly to the next; he uses slight rhymes, words spelled similarly but pronounced differently; he uses repetition of critical words and phrases, like chanting; and he freely shifts grammatical function—verbs become nouns, which become adjectives to artfully stagger the realized meaning.