In My Craft or Sullen Art

In “In My Craft or Sullen Art” (1946), renowned Welsh poet Dylan Thomas (1914-1953) asks the age-old question: Why write poetry? In the poem, a poet sits alone at a writing desk bathed in moonlight. He is compelled by an energy he does not entirely understand to spend his night toiling over lines of poetry. The poem explores the creative process that links a lonely poet to the people he writes for—not guaranteed readers, but instead those who may never care about the lines he is working on. The poem considers how the profound connection of lovers bound by romantic love defined by sharing hardship compares with the commitment at the heart of writing of poetry.

Thomas affirms with sincerity that poets do not write for fame or for financial remuneration or even for a place in posterity; instead, they write because in exploring emotions, they connect with the experiences of others. In the dynamic between poet and reader, Thomas finds a contradiction: Poetry creates an intimacy between poet and reader that is akin to love, but the people the poet writes for may never read the poet’s work, locking the poet in an existential loneliness that defines, for Thomas, the postmodern world.

Poet Biography

Dylan Marlais Thomas was born on October 27, 1914, in the small town of Swansea on the southern coast of Wales. His father, a grammar school English teacher, introduced Thomas to wide range of poets: the subtle music of Edgar Allan Poe, the broad and sweeping vision of Walt Whitman, and the complex spiritualism of William Blake.

Thomas left school when he was 16 and began working as a reporter in Swansea. In 1934, Thomas, determined to be a poet, moved to London. In the next five years, he published three collections featuring intricate word play and structural innovations. In an era defined by the intimidating, cerebral work of the Modernists, Thomas’s poems were joyously, unabashedly lyrical and unironically emotional.

His collections never sold well. Determined to make living for his wife and three children, Thomas began working for the BBC as a scriptwriter. Turned down for military service because of his weak lungs, Thomas struggled to make ends meet during the war, increasingly turning to alcohol to cope.

Thomas’s 1946 collection Deaths and Entrances, which contained “In My Craft or Sullen Art,” reflects his increasingly spiritual vision, inspired by the mysticism of Blake. It was during this time that Thomas crafted his most often quoted poem, “Do Not Go Gentle into that Good Night.”

Exhausted emotionally and becoming dependent on alcohol, Thomas left London in 1949 and returned to Wales, to the idyllic town of Laugharne. He wrote plays, most prominently the radio play Under Milk Wood (1953), about the simple grace of vanishing Welch rural life. With the success of his Collected Poems (1952), Thomas found a new career lecturing in America. His manic, energetic performances became famous.

Touring took a toll on Thomas. He relied on binge drinking and took morphine to help ease his breathing difficulties. On November 9, 1953, at age 39, Thomas collapsed in his room at the Chelsea Hotel in New York City and died of complications from pneumonia. He was buried under a simple white cross in a churchyard in Laugharne. In 1982, a memorial stone in his honor was added to Poets’ Corner in Westminster Abbey, the highest honor the United Kingdom confers on its writers.

Poem text

In my craft or sullen art

Exercised in the still night

When only the moon rages

And the lovers lie abed

With all their griefs in their arms,

I labour by singing light

Not for ambition or bread

Or the strut and trade of charms

On the ivory stages

But for the common wages

Of their most secret heart.

Not for the proud man apart

From the raging moon I write

On these spindrift pages

Nor for the towering dead

With their nightingales and psalms

But for the lovers, their arms

Round the griefs of the ages,

Who pay no praise or wages

Nor heed my craft or art.

Thomas, Dylan. “In My Craft or Sullen Art.” 1946. Poets.org.

Summary

The speaker, presumably Dylan Thomas himself, directly addresses the reader. He acknowledges that when he writes his poetry, his “craft or sullen art” (“sullen” here means “solitary”), he is alone on a quiet night in which only the moon can express its “rage” (Line 3). While lovers everywhere are coupling in their beds, making love despite—or possibly to—all “their griefs” (Line 5), which they hold in their arms, the speaker writes poetry.

The poet’s process is onerous enough to be called “labour” (Line 6). He undertakes it not for “ambition or bread” (Line 7), in other words, not to make a name for himself or for financial security. Nor does a poet work for fame, what he dismisses as the phony “strut” and the shallow, polite chit-chat (the “trade of charms” [Line 8]) of public life. Rather, he writes for a different sort of “common wages” (Line 10), the reward of exploring the deepest and most complicated urgencies of the “heart” (Line 11). He also dismisses the notion that poets write out of ego, and rejects the idea that poets seek out loners who refuse to form connections to others—“the proud man apart” (Line 12).

The poet acknowledges that the lines he toils over might not even last. He might change them, scratch them out, even throw them away. He compares his poem-in-process to “spindrift” (Line 14), the spray that blows off roiling ocean waves.

He rejects the notion that he writes as a way to pay homage to the “towering dead” (Line 15), the iconic poets who came before him, whose work Line 16 dismisses as “nightingales and psalms.” This shorthand refers to two sources that critics suggested were Thomas’s principal influences: the great British Romantics (“nightingales” is a reference to the classic ode of John Keats), and the Old Testament (“psalms”).

In the closing quatrain, the speaker clarifies why he does write. He writes his poetry for lovers who are discovering the complex joys and sorrows of love as they metaphorically put their arms around “the griefs of the ages” (Line 18). Ironically, these absorbed lovers pay no heed to the poet or to his “craft” (Line 20). They do not pay him, do not read the work, and possibly do not even know he exists—which makes them the purest audience. Any other motivation—ambition, money, fame—renders the poet’s claim to be an artist shallow and ironic.