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

He further prays for her to "Sleep, good, for ever, slow and deep, spelled rare and wise" (line 8). This metaphorical sleep in the heart of nature (in its "greenwood keep") plays a special role in the poem as a nourishing state of being, a blissful state of deep timeless rest that will make her "rare and wise." It is the only foolproof protection against deception and faithlessness and suffering.

The imagery of "In Country Sleep" is often charmingly oblique. It is characterized by a "reflexive arrangement" that results in "glancing hints" rather than direct hits (Tindall 275). Thomas writes, for example:

...no gooseherd or swine will turn Into a homestall king or hamlet of fire And prince of ice ....(10-12)

The words "homestall" and "hamlet," "king" and "prince," "fire" and "ice" form pairs that neatly play off of one another, though not profoundly (Tindall 275). Tindall critically notes that "Hamlet seems a little out of keeping with the other personae" (275), but this Shakespearean reference calls to mind a triangle of somewhat parallel relationships: namely, the vulnerable Ophelia, her over-protective father Polonius, and the fiery lover Hamlet. Similarly, the Prospero-Miranda-Ferdinand triad in The Tempest parallels, if loosely, the triangle of figures "In Country Sleep." Miranda, the sweet but naive daughter of the bitter exiled magician Prospero--who uses his art to make her sleep while launching his counterplot--falls in love with Ferdinand, the son of Prospero's enemy. Further, Prospero's half-human slave Caliban, son of a witch, has designs on his daughter, similar to Thomas's Thief, and has once been stopped on the point of violating her. Literary parallels such as these, even if submerged, add interesting shades of meaning to the poem.

The dramatic movement of the poem proceeds from fatherly reassurances that she need never fear that fairy tale wolves will pounce, or that ordinary farmhands will metamorphose into either fiery or frigid princes with a mind to woe, to an all-out celebration of nature, the "sanctum sanctorum." For

who unmanningly haunts the mountain ravened eaves Or skulks in the dell moon but moonshine echoing clear From the starred well? (24-26)

The night is full of holy sights and sounds: a hill "touches an angel" (line 27), like a monolithic Old Testament patriarch; the nun-like nightingale "lauds through nunneries and domes of leaves/Her robin breasted tree," that is, the robin-red, blood-stained cross of Christ, before which in the moonlight kneel a trinity of Marys (lines 27-29), his mother Mary, Mary Magdalene, and a mystery Mary(7); the rain "tells its beads" like

nun dangling her long shiny black rosary (line 31); the owl "knells" like a grave preacher (line 32); the fox and holt "kneel" reverently before their sacrifice of blood (line 32); a star rises over the pasture, a reminder of the star-of-Bethlehem (line 34); and throughout the night the grass "bows" on the "lord's table" (line 35), the fertile fields of the whole countryside. The sacred activities of unspoiled nature are thus carried and linked by a host of holy, active verbs. The "prayer-wheeling moon (line 41) Tindall sees as "a Buddhist intrusion" (276) upon the religious tales and fables to which Thomas has shifted in these stanzas, but it could be said that it evocatively gives the imaginary landscape a more universal quality.