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

Balakier, James J

Among the relatively few father-daughter poems in the "canon," Dylan Thomas's "In Country Sleep" is striking for its frank portrayal of a caring though conflicted state of fatherhood. Other poems belonging to this diverse lyric sub-genre, such as Jonson's "On my First Daughter," Wordsworth's "Surprised by Joy, "Yeats's "A Prayer for My Daughter," are essentially expressions of the poet-father's deep concern for the well-being of his living or dead daughter that have little to do with the existence of the child in her own right. Thomas's poem, an arguably Browningesque dramatic monologue of "a soul in action," addressed just after story-telling bedtime to the sleeping child, voices the playing out of a universal parental crisis, that of loving but letting go of the son or daughter so nature can take its course. Thomas's poem for his eldest son Llewelyn, "This Side of the Truth," is, on the other hand, one of his most didactic lyrics. In it the poet-father kindly tells the boy that there are two ways of "moving about your death," "good and bad." "In Country Sleep" is a far more arresting and complex treatment involving a loving father's deep, oedipally colored attachment to his daughter and his concern that she retain her natural innocence and faith in life.

The popularity of Thomas's poem since his death may be attributed in part to the wide appeal of the straight-forward situation it dramatizes--a father confronting his concerns for his sleeping daughter's welfare.(1) However, when William York Tindall told Thomas that he "thought this poem to be about how it feels to be a father, Thomas cried, but whether from vexation, beer or sentimental agreement I could not tell" (Tindall 273). In actuality, "In Country Sleep," despite the immediate sense of connection readers may feel with it, has been the subject of varied critical interpretations(2) turning on the identity of the mysterious Thief who the father fears will steal his sleeping daughter's faith in "the green good" of country existence. Thomas once told a woman that the unidentified Thief, usually assumed to be Time or Death,(3) was in reality jealousy, and that the poem was addressed to his wife Caitlin (Ferris 226), from whom he was increasingly alienated in the 1940's. Their marital problems in fact figure in several poems, including "I make this in a warring absence," "How shall my animal," and perhaps most notably "Into her Lying Down Head," in which the speaker's enemies enter his wife's "faithless sleep." Still, Thomas gave a quite different explanation at another time to a reporter in New York: "Alcohol is the thief today. But tomorrow he could be fame or success or exaggerated introspection or self-analysis. The thief is anything that robs you of your faith, or your reason for being" (Quoted in Ferris 227).

By the same token, all three of the figures involved in the central action of "In Country Sleep" have a Joycean resonance and reflect multiple prototypical identities. Joyce was Thomas's "most admired prose writer" from whom "he learnt wordplay" (Dylan Thomas: Letters to Vernon Watkins 14). The influence of Joyce's mythmaking, pun-filled "funferal," Finnegans Wake, which has been described as "a prodigious, multifaceted monomyth, not only the cauchemar of a Dublin citizen but the dreamlike saga of guilt-stained, evolving humanity" (Campbell and Robinson 3), is subtly evident in Thomas's poem, though his mythologizing operates on a much smaller scale. Thomas's persona is in a sense all fathers (and possibly all husbands too) and has affinities with figures ranging from Shakespeare's benign father-magician, Prospero, to the biblical or Miltonic Adam, the father of humankind, out of whose "yawning wound" God extracted the rib from which he made his helpmeet Eve. The sleeping daughter herself is an amalgamation of fairy tale heroines such as the "Haygold haired" Goldilocks, Sleeping Beauty, and Little Red Riding Hood, along with Adam's beautiful but disobedient wife, Eve. The sly, shape-shifting Thief parallels the metamorphosing Satan who in serpent-form tempted Eve, in the garden of Eden, and whom Milton describes as "the first grand thief" who climbed "into God's fold" (Paradise Lost IV. 192). He also recalls Zeus, who took various forms to seduce mortal women, including that of a swan, a golden shower, and a woman's own husband.

Thomas's highly lyrical, allusion-rich poem belongs to an unfinished series titled In Country Heaven, which includes two other completed poems, "Over Sir John's Hill" (1949) and "In the White Giant's Thigh" (1950). Thomas disclosed the subject of In Country Heaven in a BBC Radio broadcast he gave on September 25, 1950. As a result of such broadcasts in the pre-Television, post-WWII radio days, Thomas "became a familiar voice in every home, and in every sense a celebrity" (Tremlett 107) for his over-the-air readings and literary talks. He was a mid-century media star, but one who was tragically ill-equipped for handling fame.(4) Thomas explained in this particular broadcast that these three poems "form separate parts of a long poem which is in preparation" ("Three Poems" 177). The plan," he confided to his listeners,

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."

Thomas wrote the poem in 1947 while with his family in Italy on an extended vacation, financed by Margaret Taylor, a particularly devoted patroness. He complained to her in correspondence that his thoughts were fixed on his home in Wales where his father was "chronically ill" (Ferris 225). He also reported to her on the slow poem he was writing:

My poem, of 100 lines, is finished, but needs a few days' work on it, especially on one verse. Then I'll send you a copy. The manuscript is thousands & thousands of foolscap pages scattered all over the place but mostly in the boiler fire. What I'll have to send you will be a fair copy. I think it's a good poem. But it has taken so long, nearly three months, to write, that it may be stilted. I hope not. (Dylan Thomas: The Collected Letters 651)

In spite of Thomas's concerns about stiltedness, "In Country Sleep" is a masterful example of free-flowing syllabic verse, his preferred medium for his later poems.(6) Because it is based upon syllable count rather than the patterned alternation of stressed and unstressed syllables, syllabic-verse allows for a more individual reading and even perception of a poem than conventional verse. Since there is no strict indication of how the poem should be read, the reader has more than ordinary freedom in weighting words and alternating rhythms. Syllabic-verse thus provided Thomas with a flexible verse-medium for expressing subtleties of voice and meaning.

The poem, which totals 111 lines, is divided into two sections. Part I consists of 9 seven-line stanzas following an a-b-c-b-a-a-c pattern of half rhymes; Part II is made up of 8 six-line stanzas with an a-b-b-c-c-a pattern. The fifth line of the stanza-form used in Part I and the fourth line of that used in Part II are four syllables; the other lines range from 12 to 13 syllables. Proportionally there are more 13 syllable lines in Part II (about one-half of the 48 lines, compared to about one-third of the 63 lines of Part I). Thomas's insertion of a short line near the end of the stanza deepens the expressive value of the poem by incorporating a long visual pause into the stanzaic framework that substitutes a pregnant aural silence for the missing eight or nine syllables that occur in the normative lines. The extended lines, on the other hand, metrically suggest the expansive landscape spaces of the poem, with its references to the girl's "hilly/High riding" over the countryside. The stanzas are heavily enjambed within themselves and from one stanza to the next, a feature which also reinforces the girl's far and wide riding, along with the urgent tone of the father's monologue, and the Thief's tireless movement, likened to the sea of dew that "Flows to the strand of flowers" (line 98).

"In Country Sleep" begins on a heart-felt note of parental assurance:

Never and never, my girl riding far and near In the land of the hearthstone tales, and spelled asleep, Fear or believe that the wolf in a sheepwhite hood Loping and bleating roughly and blithely shall leap, My dear, my dear, Out of a lair in the flocked leaves in the dew dipped year To eat your heart in the house in the rosy wood. (1-7)

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.

Two transitional words, however, signal that trouble is afoot even in the midst of all the sacred goodness and beauty of the country. There is something, after all, that she must fear, for her own good, with all of her life. "Fear most," he warns, not the imaginary "baaing" wolf or the "tusked prince" disguised in a pigsty, toiling away for her love, "but the Thief as meek as the dew" (line 38), for "out of the beaked, web dark" (line 48), like the god/swan who seized Leda, he will find a sure, sly way to her, the speaker's own "lost love" (line 53). The Thief's nightly arrival, continuing until she is "tolled" to sleep by the "stern bell" of death (lines 51-52), is conveyed through falling images:

This night and each night since the falling star you were born, Ever and ever he finds a way, as the snow falls, As the rain falls, hail on the fleece, as the vale mist rides Through the haygold stalls, as the dew falls on the wind Milled dust of the apple tree and the pounded islands Of the morning leaves, as the star falls, as the winged Apple seed glides,

And falls, and flowers in the yawning wound at our sides, As the world falls, silent as the cyclone of silence. (55-63)

The catalog of falling objects to which the Thief's arrival is compared--snow, rain, hail, dew, leaves, winged seeds, a falling star--includes "the cyclone of silence" that kills the world, possibly an apocalyptic allusion to the atom bomb. These images associate the Thief with nature as both a creative and destructive force, and also, suggestively, with the girl herself, who we are told was born under a "falling star," or rather was the star itself falling to her earthly home. The winged-apple seed, which "glides/ And falls, and flowers in the yawning wound at our sides," requires special analysis. It is probably an allusion to the biblical Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, the eating of whose fruit brought death into the world. The universal human wound within which its seed takes root may be original sin. It could also be a reference to the sword-wound inflicted upon the crucified Christ, who was sacrificed in repayment for mankind's sins, or the wound in Adam's side from which the rib was removed for Eve's creation.

The first section of the poem thus silently ends on ambiguous notes of destruction and creation, sin and redemption. This silence has mixed meanings, suggesting, on the one hand, a tornado of annihilation, but on the other, through a string of associations, the graceful, easy seasonal fall of natural phenomena. The imagery seems to signal a deep-seated, unresolved ambivalence in the father's consciousness concerning an impending change in his daughter's existence. Still, he believes that the sleeping girl need only remain "cool" in her vows (line 47) to be spared an awful fate.

Out of the substantial pause with which the first part concludes grow more ambiguities in the second part of the poem. Strange images, familiar but undergoing a dream-like distortion, arise in stanzas 10-12, all of which are given an ambiguous spin as nighttime obscurity and uncertainty seem to deepen with the Thief's approach to the idyllic cottage where the girl sleeps "under linen and thatch/and star" (lines 44-45). The rush of dissonant images and the thirteen fragmentary exclamations that occur throughout stanzas 10-13 reveal a battle in the father's psyche over the meaning of the Thief's sly and sure arrival.

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).

In stanza 15 Thomas subtly changes from an a-b-b-c-c-a to an a-a-a-b-b-b pattern of almost entirely full rhymes:

Only for the turning of the earth in her holy Heart] Slyly, slowly, hearing the wound in her side go Round the sun, he comes to my love like the designed snow, And truly he Flows to the strand of flowers like the dew's ruly sea, And surely he sails like the ship shape clouds. Oh he comes....(94-100)

The open sound of the long o's in the a-a-a position of the first three lines, amplified internally by "Only" and "slowly," has an exclamatory quality, which is made explicit in line 99 with the words "Oh he...." The constricted quality of the long e vowels of the latter three rhymes seems aimed at dramatizing the Thief's imminent entry through a sound expressive of tightening and even fear. For the Thief, who is near at hand now, comes hearing "the wound in her side" (line 95). The wound is an image of human frailty that "makes her one with mankind" (Tindall 279) insofar as it connects her to both Adam and Christ, as discussed above. It is so all-encompassing that it goes "Round the sun," overshadowing even the light of day. The Thief comes to her like the cold, symmetrically designed snow, and like "the dew's ruly sea" that operates according to strict meteorological laws (lines 96-98).

The emotional pitch of the poem peaks in stanzas 16 and 17, in which the father, coming as if full circle, shifts from the angry third person back to the intimate second person mode of address of Part I:

...Oh he Comes designed to my love to steal not her tide raking Wound, nor her riding high, nor her eyes, nor kindled hair, But her faith that each vast night and the saga of prayer He comes to take

Her faith that this last night for his unsacred sake He comes to leave her in the lawless sun awaking

Naked and forsaken to grieve he will not come. Ever and ever by all your vows believe and fear My dear this night he comes and night without end....(99-108)

The phrase "he comes," repeated four times, heightens the dramatic tension which is then released with the unexpected words with which this sentence concludes, "He comes to take/ Her faith...to grieve he will not come." This long, unusual sentence flips over on itself syntactically in the middle and then rejoins its beginning like a moebius strip, signaling a critical turn in the speaker's argument. He reveals unexpectedly that the Thief is not just some arch sexual adventurer,(10) for he has not come to steal her beauty ("her eyes or her kindled hair"); or her virginity, for "tide raking/Wound" seems to be a reference to the tidally related, post-lapsarian "wound" of menstruation, which would be discontinued or "stolen" during pregnancy. The other element in this parallel grouping, her "riding high," may refer to her outward freedom. On the other hand, on the Caedmon recording he made of "In Country Sleep" in March 1952 (Murdy 111) Thomas substitutes "riding thigh." Though "riding high" appears in the printed versions of the poem, including his Collected Poems, also published in 1952, this substitution may indicate that Thomas found "riding thigh," at least at some point in the textual history of the poem, a suitable alternative with its obvious sexual connotations. In any case, the Thief comes, instead, "for his unsacred sake," to steal her faith in his very coming.

A surprising reversal has occurred. The speaker's attitude to the dreaded Thief has seemingly undergone a sudden and ambiguous change. Through the body of the poem he has gravely voiced his fears concerning the silent, sly intentions of this relentless Thief. All along, the Thief's ill-fated coming has been a terrible concern; now the thought of his not coming has moved, paradoxically, to the forefront as a problem. Not just for the daughter, who (the father assumes) needs to believe in his arrival; but also, it appears, for the father himself in so far as he empathizes with his daughter's feelings. The father continues to regard the Thief's irreversible coming with alarm; yet when interpreted in the context of his daughter's fear of being "forsaken," his passionate insistence that her happiness depends upon always believing in the Thief's arrival can be read as a dramatic change of heart.

The ambiguity of this reversal is encapsulated by the statement that she should both "believe and fear" (echoing "believe or fear" in line 22) that he comes "night without end." The phrase "believe and fear" has a contradictory ring, as if he is telling her to both want him to come but at the same time to recoil from his coming. But it can also be understood to mean that she should trust that he will indeed come, "by all

her

vows," while remaining conscious of the real dangers that his entrance into her life presents. The father-persona's mixed perception of the Thief, in the end, is indicated by Thomas's straddling of the matter of whether the Thief is an absolute evil or necessary good in the sleeper's life. He comes, we are told, for his "unsacred sake," but at the same time the father has finally if reluctantly acknowledged that the Thief's destined coming is a cherished event in the girl's life.

What, then, is the significance of this change and how does it reflect upon the possible identities and meanings of the Thief? The poem is framed as a father's prayer-like monologue to his sleeping daughter. Read on this most external level as the dramatic monologue of a father in a state of crisis concerning his daughter's predestined coming of age, the climax of "In Country Sleep" takes on the power of a Freudian catharsis in which the father may be seen spontaneously coming to terms with his daughter-fixation. The father-persona's choice of words ("My dear, my dear," "my love asleep," "my own, lost love") is suggestive of lover's language. His painful outburst that the Thief "comes designed to my love" suggests subconscious sexual jealousy. Further, the reference to her "riding thigh" (on the recording), and the image of her waking "Naked and forsaken," hint strongly that a sexual preoccupation with the sleeper has surfaced. When asked if he was influenced by Freud, Thomas replied:

Yes. Whatever is hidden should be made naked. To be stripped of darkness is to be clean, to strip of darkness is to make clean. Poetry, recording the stripping of the individual darkness, must, inevitably, cast light upon what has been hidden for too long, and, by so doing, make clean the naked exposure. Freud cast light on a little of the darkness he had exposed. ("Replies to an Enquiry" 190)

The breadth and depth of Thomas's knowledge of Freud and modern psychology in general have been questioned.(11) Within his poetry and his visionary short stories, however, a search "for a relationship between the conscious and unconscious" (Pratt 148) is embodied and references to dreams, hallucinations, and madness are common. Surely, too, the obscurity which is a defining characteristic of much of his work is to be understood as an artistic by-product of the exploration of the psychological complexities associated with a Freudian or related model of consciousness. Whether Thomas actually expected his readers to be familiar with Freudian theory in order to be able to properly understand his works is questionable. Still, an inherent Freudian dynamic is present in the situation of a father dreading his own displacement by a lover who seems destined to steal his daughter's heart; or if we take seriously (as we probably should) Thomas's remark that the sleeper is his wife Caitlin from whom he was estranged, of a husband agonizing over his wife's fidelity and happiness.

But this Freudian interpretation of the father's state of mind is undoubtedly too limited. It falls short of accounting for the interrelated symbolic values of the poem. It requires that the Thief be viewed essentially in the most concrete narrative terms as the sleeper's potential sexual suitor and the father's (or husband's) rival for her love, while it is clear from Thomas's imagery here and in other poems (such as "Grief Thief of Time" and "Fern Hill") that the Thief is a more profound phenomenon.

Two prevalent views o the Thief are that he is Christ or Time /Death. Moynihan, for example, argues that the Thief is either Christ, who in II Peter III. 10 is said to come "as a thief in the night," or the Thief of the Apocalypse, in Revelation XVI 15, who would have the believer "keep his garments" of faith ("Dylan Thomas and the 'Biblical Rhythm" 91). Moynihan points out, however, that they do not come "to steal the faith of the believer in 'the saga of prayer' as Thomas's Thief does" (92). It may also be pointed out that "the saga of prayer" could ambiguously refer to either the daughter's bedtime prayers, or the father's prayer for her well-being that is embodied by the poem itself.

Alan Bold holds that "At its finale the poem is resolved as a contest between the Christ of the child's simple prayer and Time, the Thief" (167). We argues in fact that the "He" in these lines is at times the Thief/Time and at other times Christ:

The sense of these syntactically difficult lines is that he (i.e. Time, the Thief) comes to steal the child's faith (which is that Christ comes to her each night in prayer--'He comes') and to take away her faith (which is so that Christ comes for his own, 'unsacred,' sake to her) in order to 'leave her in the lawless sun'--that is, leave her in a world without order. Time threatens the child's belief that everything is holy. Time introduces nightmare into the world of the sleeping child. Thomas, however, promises his daughter that Christ will come to her ever night and will continue to do so, despite the Thief. If she accepts this paternal assurance then her faith will endure. (168)

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.

Importantly, Thomas's Thief bears a strong resemblance to William Blake's "spectre," a shadowy figure who is the enemy of what Blake refers in a letter as the "Real Man

,

the Imagination which Liveth for Ever" (The Poetry and Prose of William Blake 707).

Blake's visionary poetry was one of the most seminal influences on the young Thomas. Korg clarifies the relationship of Thomas's work to Blake's:

Though Thomas' cosmos is far more fragmentary than the one found in Blake's Prophetic Books, it has some of the same energies, gigantic deities, and above all, the same 'fearful symmetry' of balanced patterns formed by opposing forces. (180)

In Jerusalem, for example, Blake bitterly sets a crippling rationalist/scientific worldview in opposition to the true life of the imagination through the antagonistic "Spectrous Chaos" figure who tells Albion, a Blakean archetype for the disintegrated self, that

I am your Rational Power O Albion & that Human Form You call Divine, is but a Worm seventy inches long That creeps forth in a night & is dried in the morning sun In fortuitous concourse of memorys accumulated & lost It plows the Earth in its own conceit. (29:5-11)(13)

The spectre mocks the idea of the existence of the higher self or "Poetic Genius" as a delusion fabricated out of memories and dreams. This predicament, involving a clash between, on the one hand, the cut and dry activities of experimental science, and on the other, the inspired approach of art--an opposition central to the Prophetic Books--is resolved in Book II of Blake's Milton in which the long dead poet, returning to the earth as the "Awakener," aspires to a higher state of imaginative redemption than he attained in his life. In the process, Milton casts out his own spectre or internalized, egotistical "Satan," and is recreated new and whole. As Blake writes:

To bathe in the Waters of Life; to wash off the Not Human I come in Self-annihilation & the grandeur of Inspiration To cast off Rational Demonstration by Faith in the Saviour To cast off the rotten rags of Memory by Inspiration To cast off Bacon, Locke & Newton from Albion's covering To cast off his filthy garments, & clothe him with Imagination....(1-6)

Thomas's dark power, the Thief, is associated like Blake's spectre with rationalistic reductionism, but by means of sterile, impotent images such as the lifeless "designed snow," and the disempowered "ruled" sun at the end of the poem. And just as the spectre must be cast out or annihilated in order for Blake's Milton to gain the Waters of Life or, in the words of "To the Christians," the "Intellectual Fountain" (Blake 229), Thomas's menacing Thief is at once negated and transformed into a beneficial figure who can help the girl awaken to a higher state of innocence, aware of time and death and the world's ambivalences but not overclouded by them. Ultimately, then, the Thief has the power to steal her old limited image of her self so that she can be liberated from captivity to dualities.(14)

Notwithstanding Blakean and other levels of meaning, the "grand and simple" idea of the poem is that the greatest obstacle to fulfillment the girl faces is a debilitating loss of faith in her own inner resources. This is what the father most fears will be taken from the girl, but it is a theme which the father's complex state of conflicted emotion prevents from becoming sentimental, and to which his last minute about-face concerning the mystery Thief adds great dramatic force. In the final analysis the father-poet seems to leave open-ended whether belief in the Thief's coming is actually desirable either because it will put his daughter on her guard so she will deny the Thief an opportunity to steal her faith and goodwill, or because it will affirm her faith in something or someone in which she has already placed all her trust. Her happiness is what is at stake; it is what she stands to lose if she forgets through a mistake of the intellect her connection to the source of all the joys imaginatively associated with the ever green and good country. The father is simply a witness of a process that is out of his direct control, though not entirely out of reach of his loving influence.

The ending is appropriately conditional, given the above line of reasoning, for she is told that only if she believes and fears that the Thief will come shall she wake

...from country sleep, this dawn and each first dawn, Your faith as deathless as the outcry of the ruled sun. (110-111)

These closing lines (with the overlong 14 syllable line 110 calling special attention to itself) emphasize undying faith and spiritual rebirth, but with an ironic twist. The "ruled sun," which contrasts with the "lawless sun" of the penultimate stanza, may be the sun of scientific fact, against whose quantifications the imagination revolts.(15) But it is also almost certainly a serious, punning reference to the son of God, who was "ruled" in the sense that he submitted to his father's will by accepting crucifixion for the sake of humanity, but who cried out from the cross the "deathless" words recorded in the New Testament, "Why hast thou forsaken me?" This implied evocation of Christ's human outcry against suffering challenges any conventional notions of blind faith and obedience. Ironically it stresses the absolute importance of challenging even an omnipotent parental authority if it appears to compromise the integrity of the heart--a powerful message with which to conclude a monologue ostensibly about a father-daughter relationship.

"In Country Sleep" effectively fits Thomas's description of the In Country Heaven poems as the "tellings," all through the long night, of what the "heavenly hedgerow-men, once of Earth" remember in their "Edenie hearts": "places, fears, loves, exultation, misery, animal joy, ignorance and mysteries, all we know and do not know" ("Three Poems" 179). It is a satisfying, meaningfully ambiguous reenactment of the deep-seated psychological tensions between a father-husband and his daughter-wife, the resolution of which, however tentative, supports the autonomy of the beautiful, high-spirited sleeper. The sleep of the title is a metaphor for the power of the imagination, which is unlocked by dreams and fairy tales and myths. It holds the "heart's truth" that Thomas prays at the end of "Poem in October" will continue to inspire him on his next birthday. Thomas sees it as a solution to the fact-bound, hard-realities of modern life, that can numb the sensibilities. This magical sleep has the power to make the sleeper happy and whole, like the fully awakened Snow White or Sleeping Beauty, or the heroines of Shakespeare's Midsummer Night's Dream or The Tempest. This is the father's holy wish for the charmed dreamer as she wakes.

1 His daughter Aeronwy, who was four at the time the poem was written, has I believe given well-received public readings of "In Country Sleep" in America. The poem's appeal is in considerable measure due to the special father-daughter bond it reflects and that Thomas must have actually had at some level with his daughter. Recently the writer Norman Zerold told me that while attending the University of Iowa in the early 1950s he talked with Thomas, who had arrived early for a Sunday morning poetry reading. When he asked him how he was able cope with such a heavy travel schedule, Thomas answered that his family in Laugharne "made it all worth while," and he mentioned Aeronwy in particular.

2 Tindall writes that the Thief "could represent the knowledge that destroys innocence and glory" (280). Jacob Korg argues that he stands for "the encroachments of maturity" (127). Annis Pratt explains that "The Thief, while bringing experience with its knowledge of death, is also Christ, since the young girl seems to represent the virgin earth violated by incarnation" (165). The Thief has thus been seen ambiguously as everything from an inducer to a fall from innocence, like the serpent in Eden, to an incarnating divinity.

3 For example, "Above all, time for Thomas was a thief and the source of grief. 'Grief thief of time..." (Moynihan, The Craft and Art of Dylan Thomas 250). See also Paul Ferris 226.

4 Tremlett's thesis in his revisionest biography is that Thomas was the pioneer of a kind of fame based upon "establishing contact with his audience aurally" (180)--a phenomenon that exploded when "rock 'n' roll revolutionized the music industry in the Sixties" (109).

5 All quotes from Thomas's poetry are from The Collected Poems of Dylan Thomas, which contains all the poems Thomas wished to preserve.

6 See Daniel Jones's "A Note on Verse-Patterns" in The Poems of Dylan Thomas, 245-49.

7 Tindall quips that "The third Mary is a problem, unless quite contrary or followed by a lamb" (276). Maybe so, but Thomas could have had in mind Mary, sister of Lazarus, who sat at Jesus's feet and devotedly heard his words, while her complaining sister Martha bustled about trying to serve her guests.

8 Moynihan in The Craft and Art of Dylan Thomas discusses Thomas's establishment of this technique of "affinitive patterning" in Part I of "In Count Sleep" (14748).

9 The phrases "The leaping saga of prayer" and "the sermon of blood" illustrate Thomas's highly compressed metaphor-building method. In the first (it could be said) the leaping of fleeing animals is treated as a kind of metaphor for a life and death saga which inspires anxious prayers; in the second, the spilled blood, whether animal or human, may provide a sermon or lesson on our mortality.

10 He comes to leave her in the lawless sun awaking/Naked and forsaken," however, explicitly makes a sexual connection between the sleeping girl and the mystery Thief in the context of betrayal.

11 See Pratt for. an overview of this issue ('L4-25).

12 See also Burdette, who sees the girl as the "soul" and the Thief as Christ (69, 133). His interpretation is based on parallels between Thomas's religious beliefs and "a long tradition of religious experience that is closely allied to the 'occult tradition,' represented here by Gnosticism" (9).

13 All Blake selections are from The Poet and Prose of William Blake.

14 Another parallel, though a non-Western one, is the Vedic (referring to the ancient Hindu texts called collectively the Vedas) concept of pragyaparadha, which translates as "the mistake of the intellect." This condition is the result of the intellect's fragmentation, its loss of its own self-aware state, through identification with the objects of perception. Robert Keith Wallace, a researcher in Vedic studies, explains pragyaparadha as follows:

The intellect has the ability to shift our attention in one of two directions: either outward toward the diversity of life, or inward toward the unity of consciousness....In this condition

of pragyaparadha

, the intellect becomes so absorbed in the diversified value of creation that it cannot perceive the underlying unity of life....(95)

Although there is no reason for believing that Thomas's vast reading extended deeply into Eastern philosophy, his Thief appears to personify "the mistake of the intellect": the Thief is that which the father believes will steal the girl's innocent enjoyment of all things wonderful. I mention this seeming convergence of Thomas's eclectic thought with an Eastern insight as an interesting, even illuminating parallel insofar as it suggests the depth of Thomas's exploration of the psyche's "darkness," upon which he, like Freud, sought to cast light.

15 Tindall conjectures along these lines that "The lawless sun' could be the world of fact and nature's apparent disorder. Is the father praying that, growing up and gaining knowledge of fact, the girl map keep her faith in the realities of the imagination...?" (280).

WORKS CITED

Blake, William. The Poetry and Prose of William Blake. Ed. David V. Erdman. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1970.

Bold, Alan. "Young Heaven's Fold: The Second Childhood of Dylan Thomas." Dylan Thomas: Craft or Sullen Art. Ed. Alan Bold. New York: St. Martin's, 1990. 156-74.

Burdette, Robert K. The Saga of Prayer. The Hague: Mouton, 1972.

Campbell, Joseph and Henry Morton Robinson. A Skeleton Key to Finnegans Wake. New York: Viking, 1944.

Ferris, Paul. Dylan Thomas. New York: Penguin, 1978.

Korg, Jacob. Dylan Thomas. New York: Twayne, 1965.

Milton, John. Complete Poems and Major Prose. Ed. Merritt Y. Hughes. Indianapolis: Odyssey, 1957.

Moynihan, William T. The Craft and Art of Dylan Thomas. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1966.

--. "Dylan Thomas and the 'Biblical Rhythm.'" Critical Essays on Dylan Thomas. Ed. Georg Gaston. Boston: Hall, 1989. 70-95.

Murdy, Louise Baughan. Sound and Sense in Dylan Thomas' Poetry. The Hague: Mouton, 1966.

Pratt, Annis. Dylan Thomas' Earl Prose: A Study in Creative Mythology. Pittsburgh: U of Pittsburgh P, 1970.

Tindall, William York. A Reader's Guide to Dylan Thomas. New York: Noonday, 1962.

Thomas, Dylan. Dylan Thomas: The Collected Letters. Ed. Paul Ferris. New York: Macmillan, 1985.

--. The Collected Poems of Dylan Thomas. New York: New Directions, 1957

--. Dylan Thomas: Letters to Vernon Watkins. New York: New Directions, 1957.

--. The Poems of Dylan Thomas. Ed. Daniel Jones. New York: New Directions, 1971.

--. "Replies to an Enquiry." Quite Early One Morning. New York: New Directions, 1954. 188-190.

---. "Three Poems." Quite Earl One Morning. New York: New Directions, 1954. 177-187.

Tremlett, George. Dylan Thomas: In the Mercy of His Means. New York: St. Martin's, 1991.

Wallace, Robert Keith. The Physiology of Consciousness. Fairfield, IA: Institute of Science, Technology, and Public Policy, 1993.

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