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

is grand and simple....The godhead, the author, the milky-way farmer, the first cause, architect, lamplighter, quintessence, the beginning Word, the anthropomorphic bowler-out and black-baller, the stuff of all men, scapegoat, martyr, maker, woe-bearer-He, on top of a hill in Heaven, weeps whenever, outside that state of being called his country, one of his worlds drops dead, vanishes screaming, shrivels, explodes, murders itself. And, when he weeps, Light and His tears glide down together, hand in hand. So, at the beginning of the projected poem, he weeps, and Country Heaven is suddenly dark. Bushes and owls blow out like candles. And the countrymen of heaven crouch all together under the hedges and, among themselves in the tear-salt darkness, surmise which world, which star, which of their late, turning homes, in the skies has gone for ever. And this time, spreads the heavenly hedgerow rumour, it is Earth. The Earth has killed itself. It is black, petrified, wizened, poisoned, burst; insanity has blown it rotten; and no creatures at all, joyful, despairing, cruel, kind, dumb, afire, loving, dull, shortly and brutishly hunt their days down like enemies on that corrupted face. And, one by one, these heavenly hedgerow-men, who once were of the Earth, call

to

one another, through the long night, Light and His tears falling, what they remember, what they sense in the submerged wilderness and on the exposed hairsbreadth of the mind, what they feel trembling on the nerves of a nerve, what they know in their Edenie hearts, of that self-called place. They remember places, fears, loves, exultation, misery, animal joy, ignorance and mysteries, all we know and do not know. (178-79)

Thomas concludes his description of the projected long poem by explaining that it becomes,

at last, an affirmation of the beautiful and terrible worth of the Earth. It grows into a praise of what is and what could be on this lump in the skies. It is a poem about happiness. (180)

The In Country Heaven poems were to be, according to Thomas, a loosely related set of monologues or "rememberings" revealing what has meant the most to the assorted tellers' happiness--what they know "in their Edenie hearts" of "that self-called place" the earth. The other completed In Country Heaven poems seem to fit this formulation. In "Over Sir John's Hill" the speaker, a self-proclaimed "young Aesop," exults as he witnesses nature in action outside his boathouse window in all of its sublime beauty as a magnificent hawk drops "on fire" to kill a sparrow. Similarly, the poet-speaker of "In the White Giant's Thigh" elegizes, while walking on the site of ancient Celtic fertility rites, the "animal joy" of dead country maids. As Tindall, one of Thomas's most astute interpreters, notes, the various parts of the projected work are "among his happiest poems" (Tindall 274).

Any attempt to consider how "In Country Sleep" relates to this "grand and simple" conception must, I think, take into account the ambiguous reversal that occurs at the end of the poem. Throughout Thomas's poem the Prospero-like father, who seems to have cast a spell of blissful sleep over his daughter, projects onto her his fears of a sly but meek intruder. Suddenly, in the closing lines, the daughter's previously unmentioned opposite fear, that the Thief will not after all come ("He comes to leave her.../ Naked and forsaken to grieve he will not come" lines 105-065) bursts into the open as the underlying problem with which the father must come to terms. This is a pivotal development that has been glossed over by critics. The apparently ambiguous transition or transposition that the unwanted and despised Thief undergoes in the father's mind is the crux of "In Country Sleep."