17 pages • 34 minutes read
In My Craft or Sullen Art
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Themes
The Role of the Contemporary Poet
Dylan Thomas came of age at the height of the Modernist era when English-language poetry was largely defined by its commitment to tackling difficult social and cultural issues. The role of the poet, embodied most notably by towering figures such as T. S. Eliot, Robert Frost, and W. H. Auden, was regarded as being a provocative commentator, an outsider looking with concern at the world. Alarmed by first the brutalities of World War I, the economic catastrophe of global Depression, and the steady spread of industrialization with its threat of dehumanization, these poets brought intellectual vigor, brittle wit, and cutting irony and cynicism to their perception of civilization’s collapse.
By contrast, Thomas, influenced by the soaring, often intoxicating lyricism of the Romantics, returns poetry to this early 19th-century model. Poets, he argues in this poem, are mavericks who seek to record the experiences of the heart—its agonies and its triumphs. They should not seek material success or personal laurels; rather, they should retain the purity that comes with complete obscurity. The poem is a-temporal, in that it does not speak to its era—Thomas ignores World War II, the collapse of fascism, and the explosive revelation of the new power of atomic weaponry. Instead, Thomas argues that the poet should write as one “secret heart” (Line 11) to another; inspirations should not be drawn from “the towering dead” (Line 15)—neither previous generations of poets, nor the people slaughtered in the European or Pacific war theaters. The role of the poet is to interpret the “raging moon” (Line 13), striving for the sublime.
The Power of Love
In the poem, Thomas, from the depth of his creative loneliness, feels a closeness to lovers “abed” (Line 4), their lovemaking creating a shared space apart from the chaos and at the same time containing “all their griefs in their arms” (Line 5). Love is not a bulwark against misery, though it does insulate the lovers from the concerns of everyday life. It is to celebrate lovers and to elevate the power of such intimacy, the poet says, that he labors over his lines.
Love for Thomas is both ordinary and extraordinary. On the one hand, there are enough lovers “their arms / Round the griefs of the ages” (Lines 1-18) that the speaker can define himself in opposition to them. On the other hand, the lovers’ entanglement is not available to the poet. As he toils away alone and in silence, his only companion is “the raging moon” (Line 13)—a personified force that exhibits emotions, but cannot empathize or be embraced. The speaker reaches for the kind of connection that love offers its enjoyers. His ideal readers are so wrapped up in each other that they have little sense that either the speaker or his work exist.
The poem’s speaker understands that his lines may not last, may never be read, and are possibly as ephemeral as “spindrift” (Line 14), the misty spray that blows off powerful ocean waves. He acknowledges his loneliness. However, he still celebrates the love he himself is not actually experiencing at his desk. If his poetry has value, he argues, it is not from any fame he might receive or from any money he might secure from publishers. Rather it is from elevating the expression of emotion—the only genuine motivation of poets.
The Persistence of Loneliness
Thomas evokes the 19th-century Romantic idealization of sublimity and the depths of emotion while reimagining the figure of the lonely, misfit poet with access to rarified sensations that most people can only experience through his mediated assistance. In “In My Craft or Sullen Art,” while the poet remains alone and connected to mystic forces such as “the raging moon” (Line 13), he is also much more visibly bereft of companionship and human connection—an image that reflects existential loneliness.
The poem features two images of intimacy: the lovers whose arms encircle each other as well as “the griefs of the ages” (Line 18); and the poet, who claims a special relationship with “the raging moon” (Line 13) that is his muse. The poem privileges only one of these bonds, however. While the lovers remain “abed” (Line 4) together, sharing their griefs, the poet, for all his heroic celebration of the intimacy of otherworldly forces, is “sullen” (Line 1)—a word that in this case does not mean moody or resentful, but rather retains its original meaning of solitary. At the beginning and the end of the poem, the poet is still at his writing desk, stubbornly alone in the dark, tediously, gloriously scratching out lines, “my craft or art” (Line 20), that may or may never be read.
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By Dylan Thomas
