In My Craft or Sullen Art

"In My Craft or Sullen Art" is a poem by the Welsh poet Dylan Thomas. First published in 1946 in Thomas' poetry volume Deaths and Entrances, "In My Craft or Sullen Art" concerns the poet's motivations for writing poetry. He insists that he writes neither for profit nor even for the merest material sustenance. Rather, he writes for poetry's own sake, a kind of spiritual gain he characterizes as "the common wages of their most sacred heart." The poem has been adapted by a number of musicians, including the New Zealand pop group Mink and the British composer Thomas Hewitt Jones. It was also featured prominently in the 1971 British film, The Raging Moon, starring Malcolm McDowell.

First, the poet describes the unique circumstances under which he can successfully produce worthy poetry. These include "the still night when only the moon rages" and when "the lovers lie abed with all their griefs in their arms." By juxtaposing ideas such as love and grief, stillness and rage, the poet conjures complex emotional imagery. Though the images may appear rich in apparent contradiction, the poet seems to be setting a scene where violence and negativity are subdued but never truly eliminated. For example, the raging moon serves only to highlight the stillness of everything around it. Meanwhile, the lovers, having exhausted their passions, are left only with the ever-present grief that humanity can never fully escape. Perhaps paradoxically, it is not the loud and bright moments of our lives that inspire the emotions necessary for poetic expression. Rather, it is during these moments of calm that our lingering emotions are brought into sharper focus.

In the next lines, the poet describes the motivations behind his work. He quickly dismisses any worldly or material motivations for his work, including ambition and even food. He then clearly distinguishes his output as a poet from that of mere performers or entertainers, who seek to charm the world on beautiful stages made of ivory. This, the poet suggests, amounts to a kind of trickery and is thus ultimately emptier than what poets bring into the world. Nonetheless, the audience is still deeply important to the poet, as they are the ones who receive his words. His "wages" come from the shared and secret heart of humanity, which rewards him for briefly removing the veil from the hidden depths of the soul. This is not a magic trick but rather a sacred act of communing with that which is usually out-of-reach and incomprehensible.



In the following lines, he goes into more detail about his audience. Though theoretically anyone can be a recipient of his words, the poet describes the type of person he does not have in mind when writing. He has no patience, for instance, for "the proud man apart." Those with excess pride distance themselves from the human community and thus should not have the privilege to share in the collective secrets his poems may reveal. Nor does the poet write for "the towering dead with their nightingales and psalms." The mention of nightingales is perhaps a reference to Keats's iconic poem, "Ode to a Nightingale," which is full of symbolism related to death and mortality. On its face, the poet's refusal to write for the dead may be for the same reason he won't write for the proud: they are no longer a part of humanity. But by calling the dead "towering" and evoking the holy, Biblical nature of psalms, the poet may be suggesting that the dead have no need for the secrets of poetry because they have already learned the mysteries of existence by passing over to the land of the dead.

Finally, the poet addresses the audience for whom he does write: the lovers. By serving and finding comfort in one another, lovers are more connected to the human race than "the proud man apart" or the dead. Therefore, they have both the capacity and use for the poet's emotional revelations. He also describes lovers as having "their arms round the griefs of the ages," suggesting that they bear the brunt of centuries of suffering and are therefore in greater need of emotional comfort than the flippant man who feels not the burden of shared humanity. However, in the last two lines, the poet ends with a note of deep irony. He writes that these lovers—his ideal audience—are those "who pay no praise or wages nor heed my craft or art." In other words, the publishers, critics, and academics who actually pay attention to his work are in fact far less likely to be moved by his work than the common members of humanity who are so concerned with living life that they ignore the work of poets.

"In My Craft or Sullen Art" is a deeply evocative, brutally candid, but ultimately deflating look at the life of a poet.