ambiguous reversal of Dylan Thomas's "In Country Sleep", The

The lines are admittedly complex, but Bold's interpretation of the "He" as variously the Thief and Christ seems strained and not warranted by a close reading of the text. The Thief is an ambiguous phenomenon in and of himself, an ambiguity that turns on the conflicting views the father and daughter have of the Thief and that is reflected by the father's advice to both "believe and fear" that he will come. There is no reason for thinking that the father is here making a simple distinction between Time as an evil force and Christ as the object of faith.(12) It is the gap between the father's and the daughter's perceptions that is significant and that Thomas seems to bridge, however tentatively, in the finale.

It is entirely in keeping with Thomas's poetic practice in general for "In Country Sleep" to reach an ambiguous climax. Thomas was a master of the open-ending as stunningly exemplified by some of his most famous poems. The early poem "The Boys of Summer," structured as a debate between youth and old age, ends with these two poles of life "kissing" ambiguously "as they cross." At the end of "Fern Hill," one of his most celebrated poems, Thomas seamlessly juxtaposes childhood joy and adult bitterness as he tells the reader how "Time held me green and dying/Though I sang in my chains like the sea" while playing on his aunt and uncle's farm, ironically unaware of time and death. "Poem on His Birthday" concludes in what could be triumphant exhilaration or utter tragedy with the words "I sail out to die." The "torn and alone" man in a farm house in "A Winter's Tale," for whom "the world turned old/On a star of faith," finds love enfolded in the wings of a she-bird he has envisioned and pursued across the frozen fields, but he also finds death in the snow. Thomas's war-inspired poem "A Refusal to Mourn the Death, by Fire, of a Child in London" resoundingly ends, "After the first death, there is no other." As Tindall explains,

That 'there is no other' death after the first means, as the context demands, that death is followed by perpetual life: Christian heaven or natural rebirth in bird or flower....But, whatever the demands of context and the elegiac tradition, the line is ambiguous. 'After the first death, there is no other' can mean that death is death. There is no other because, once dead, you are dead for good. A poet as aware as Thomas of what he was about must have intended this ambiguity....(183)

Tindall's comment that Thomas must have meant the line to be ambiguous is, if anything, understated, for a poet who wrote early on in his career that "the womb / Drives in a death as life leaks out" ("A Process in the Weather of the Heart" lines 8-9) plainly saw the world in extraordinarily contradictory terms. The conclusion of "A Refusal..." is a majestic example of the intense interplay of polarities of thought and feeling- that produce an often engaging ambiguity in Thomas's poetry as a whole.

"In Country Sleep" is no exception. The contradictory nature of the Thief's coming, as either a seducer or savior, is suggested by the diversity of critical views on his identity. However, Thomas's barroom disclosure, cited above, that the Thief is anything that robs your faith, that steals your sense of self, makes clear that the Thief, rather than being a personification of a specific abstraction or a Christ-symbol of some kind, was in reality conceived as an externalization of whatever blocks or impedes a more natural state of existence, represented in the poem by the "green good" of the country where, sleeping "shielded by chant and flower," one is "spelled rare and wise." It is "a state of being" (like God's "country," referred to by Thomas as a subjective reality in "Three Poems") which is characterized by freedom from fear, uncertainty and doubt, the causes of deep-rooted, psycho-emotional stress. The Thief, it would thus seem, is an unnatural force in the psyche which jeopardizes or overshadows its happiness and wholeness.