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

The images themselves are drawn from the poetic materials out of which the father-persona could have woven his bedtime stories. But now, colored by his acute fears, these tales, parables, fables, and sagas "tell of" or signal the Thief's coming on the scene:

Night and the reindeer on the clouds above the haycocks And the wings of the great roc ribboned for the fair] The leaping saga of prayer] And high, there, on the hare Heeled winds the rooks Cawing from their black bethels soaring, the holy books Of birds] Among the cocks like fire the red fox Burning] (64-70)

Thomas describes here, and in subsequent stanzas, Santa's magical flying reindeer, presumably pulling his sleigh above the haycocks, off their usual Christmas course, as if to rescue the girl; Sinbad's gigantic killer-bird the "roc," beribboned for the fair like a domesticated 4H project, who could be imagined beating his formidable wings furiously in alarm; the fox among the cocks (perhaps an allusion to Aesop), burning gloriously in the barnyard and arousing a stir; and the cleric-like rooks who solemnly read their dark, foreboding gospel out of the book of nature. The wood itself--with the branches of its trees compared to a priest's black sleeves with cuffs of white frost--is like a clerical presence that sternly witnesses what is to come (lines 72-73). The sense of something impending is further heightened by the shrill, wind-like speech ("The upgiven ghost/of the dingle torn to singing" (lines 74-75) of a dead soul who finds a lost voice as the Thief draws nears.

The urgency conveyed by these images is reinforced by a plethora of internal half rhymes (e.g. haycocks, roc, cocks, fox; reindeer, vein; nightingale, din and tale, pail; lake, makes, wakes) and heavy consonance (e.g. blood, laced, wood) and assonance (e.g. thistling, upgiven, dingle, singing, hill).(8) Thomas, additionally, has switched in Part II to a six-line stanza-form, with a predominant a-b-b-c-c-a pattern of partial rhymes and a short fourth line. The cutting of a whole 12 or 13 syllable line from the stanza-form intensifies the poetic development of Part II.

The end of stanza 12 acts as a transition from the "leaping" saga and "sermon of blood"(9) to an epiphany involving the speaker-poet's ecstatic realization, in the middle of his dreamlike evocation of imminent danger, of the power of poetry to illuminate reality:

All tell, this night, of him Who comes as red as the fox and sly as the heeled wind.

Illumination of music] the lulled black-backed Gull, on the wave with sand in its eye] And the foal moves Through the shaken greensward lake, silent, on moonshod hooves, In the wind's wakes.

Music of elements, that a miracle makes] Earth, air, water, fire, singing into the white act....(80-87)

In a sudden flight of the imagination, the poet rises above his acute fears and finds meaning and inspiration in expressed nature. His own faith is renewed with the realization that his prayer (or poem) for his daughter parallels the pure and spontaneous "act" out of which nature, from the four elements of earth air fire and water, was created. Calmer now, he envisions nature at peace with itself, represented by a gull lulled to sleep by the waves, and a foal walking in a moonlit field of grass. As he contemplates these tranquil, reassuring images of nature at peace his attention shifts to his darling daughter, sleeping placidly, just as susceptible as the sea gull or foal to attack. But the speaker believes wholly that the girl will be safe as long as she remains in harmony with nature--as long as the earth, which holds all of God's creatures, turns in "her holy heart" (lines 94-95).