In My Craft or Sullen Art

The absence of traditional meter in Dylan Thomas’s poem reflects the raw energy of creativity—which is also the subject of this work. “In My Craft or Sullen Art” comprises 20 lines of varying lengths, unbroken by stanza breaks, suggesting that the poet is pouring out his unexpected, unanticipated encounter with his moonlight muse. Eschewing the tidy rhythms and tight rhymes of conventional poetic form, Thomas creates and sustains his own rhythm, achieved by changing meter line to line in a jazz-inflected approach that feels improvised but in fact is a careful recreation of the frenetic process of writing. The line length reflects the poet’s own musings—longer when the thoughts are more involved, shorter to reflect urgency or unvarnished candor.

Rhymes occur but are not regular, recurring several times rather than reaching for new assonance. For example, the rhymes stages/ages/wages/pages appear more than once. Rhymes also bookend the poem: The first line ends on “art,” is rhymed with in the middle of the poem via heart/apart, and then brings back the first rhyme as the last word of the poem. There are also near-rhymes in the form of arms/psalms.