In My Craft or Sullen Art

At first read, Dylan Thomas seems to be writing an ode to poets and poetry writing. In keeping with Thomas’s long-professed admiration for the Bardic tradition in Gaelic poetry, the poet/speaker in the poem, presumably Thomas himself, seems to celebrate his heroic commitment to his art, describing himself as a lone figure toiling in the night when others are “abed” (Line 4). This self-mythologizing imagery syncs with some biographical details: Thomas earned fame from his sensationalized reading and lecture tours of American colleges and universities in the early 1950s, becoming a well-known figure.

But this celebrity came after long relative obscurity; by the time of composition, Thomas’s most noted poems were nearly 10 years in the past, somewhat irrelevant and out of date (Methven, Paul. “‘In my craft or sullen art’. A new (2022) comprehensive study of Dylan Thomas’s renowned poem of self-examination.” Academia. 2022). Likewise, at its core, the poem is a rejection of celebrity and success—a long list of the kinds of material measures of accomplishment that the speaker refuses to pursue. Instead, the poem proposes that the ideal readers are unaware of the poem or the poet’s existence because they are too wrapped up in lovemaking and “all their griefs” (Line 5). The poet remains alone; while he has access to the mystical “singing light” (Line 6) of the moon that inspires his verses, this does not put him in the privileged position of the Bard.

Over the next ten lines (Lines 7-9) the poet/speaker introduces and then dismisses the usual motives for writing poetry: fame and wealth (“ambition or bread” [Line 7]), critical praise, and the ability to “strut and trade of charms” (Line 8). Many of these bring to mind the motivations expressed in previous instances of ars poetica poetry—Shakespeare’s sonnets often refer to the immortality he hopes his lines bestow, for example. But it is not clear whether it is the poet who rejects these worldly rewards, or whether he resents that he has not received them, deciding that he does not want what he cannot have. The two interpretations color the rest of the poem quite differently. If the speaker is actually hungry for the elusive honors reserved for the great poets, then the poem’s question—why the poet is at his writing desk alone and still determined to write his lines—is one of rueful futility. However, if the speaker disdains the usual laurels, then he is in the process of uncovering a deeper truth to explain the need to write—the demand that he set down what he has learned “[f]rom the raging moon” (Line 13).

Unlike the immortal work of “the towering dead” (Line 15), the great poets of eras past, the lines the speaker writes, his only solace in this difficult night, are as substantial and reliable as “spindrift” (Line 14), the mist coming off an ocean wave. John Keats, 19th-century Romantic poet, most famous for his odes and widely taught in schools, can be conjured with just the word “nightingale” (Line 16), while the even more eternal work of the psalmists of the Bible has a captive audience in Christians. In contrast, the speaker’s ideal readership offers the opposite of eternal life: The lovers he imagines as too cocooned in each other and “the griefs of the ages” (Line 18) to admire poetry, or even acknowledge its existence.

The speaker may believe that these lovers could find comfort in his poems, which explore love in all its twisted complexities, he knows that most likely, they will never “heed [his] craft and art” (Line 20), let alone pay him “praise or wages” (Line 19). Nevertheless, this does not deter the poet, who has accepted his obscurity. He writes toward potential readers compelled by their emotions, similarly finding in their complicated hearts inspiration and hope.