The Collected Poems of Dylan Thomas: The New Centenary Edition by Dylan Thomas

Author:Dylan Thomas [Thomas, Dylan]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780297865704
Publisher: Orion
Published: 2014-10-09T03:00:00+00:00

This bread I break

N4 ‘Thirty Three’, dated 24 December 1933. Published New English Weekly, 16 July 1936; collected in 25P.

On the opposite page in N4 is a draft variant, titled ‘Breakfast Before Execution’, identical except for the final line, which reads: ‘God’s bread you break, you drain His cup’. As a Christmas poem structured by Eucharistic symbolism, this lyric turns on the paradox that the life-giving symbolism of Christ’s giving of his body at the Last Supper (the ‘breakfast’) involved the ‘desolation’ of the body of nature, as crops of oats are ‘laid low’ and the ‘joy’ of the grape is ‘broken’ in making bread and wine. The poem, which some read as spoken by Christ, may be interpreted as an expression of the belief that from suffering (‘man broke the sun/son’) came salvation. However, by minimising explicit Christian references, Thomas opposes to this sense the more process-based, ‘sensual’ one of the simultaneity and inseparability of life and death, and casts ironic light on the reduction of the natural world to supernatural symbolism.

1 This bread I break = at one level the poem may be thought of as a play on the single-letter difference between ‘break’ and ‘bread’.

2 foreign tree = vine, but also the Cross.

5 grape’s joy = inverts ‘Joy’s grape’ from Keats’s ‘Ode on Melancholy’.

11 This flesh you break = the ‘you’ is not only the reader but death, which puts us back in the universal round of the processes of mortality, even as it lays waste and devours us.

12 desolation in the vein = cf. the story ‘The Enemies’: ‘desolation in his vein’.

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