About the poem –The poem was written in 1945 and published in the volume of poems

entitled Deaths and Entrances, 1946. The lyric is remarkable for its almost classical
simplicity and austerity. It has been regarded as the poetic manifesto of the poet, an
account of his artistic methods. It is a bare poem about poet, poetry, and audience. It is
a lyric of direct statement and can be understood even by the uninitiated.
However, its bareness is deceptive. The difficulties begin with the very first line with
“craft or sullen art.” Does ‘or’ imply the identity of craft and art or a distinction between
them? Certainly a craftsman, Thomas at his best, was certainly an artist. In ‘On Poetry’
he makes a distinction between the ‘intricate craft’ which may approximate accidental
magic and art itself. Preserving a distinction ‘or’ also implies a connection. But what of
‘sullen’? This fine word has a number of meanings. Gloomy, morose, peevish, and ill-
humored, the meanings that come readily to mind, are secondary. The primary meaning
is ‘lonely’, ‘solitary’, ‘unsociable’, ‘unique’. It also means ‘un-rewarding’. Thomas’ ‘sullen
art’, crowded with these meanings, is lonely and austere from his point of view, and
since this is a poem of artist and today’s audience, unsociable, and may be morose in
the eyes of that audience. It is also un-rewarding in a worldly sense.

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The craftsman pursued his art under Yeats’ ‘raging moon’, symbol of imagination and
inspiration here, while lovers sleep. Lover’s, for whom he labours, seem lovers of
women and life – common men, the ‘common wages’ of whose hearts are commonly no
payment at all. ‘Their most secret heart’ implies depth, unawareness and like Yeats’
‘secret rose’ , a multitude of remote and hidden privacies. The ‘griefs in their arms’, not
only women, are the trouble of life – ‘the griefs of the ages’.

By the ‘singing light’ of the moon that directs the tide, Dylan, the lonely craftsman,
labours without hope of fame or money. He dismisses ‘strut’ or the public pretensions of
poets and the ‘trade of charms’ or poetry as business, the exchanging of magic spells
for cash. ‘Ivory stages’ is synthesis of the private and the public, of ivory tower and
theatre. These are stages for showing off where privacies of ivory towers become public
shows

However it may be, one thing is certain. Dylan’s own life contradicts the high sentiments
expressed in this admirable lyric. He wanted high wages, wrote for money, and strutted
frequently on the public stages. He loved to be lionized and has repeatedly said in his
letters, as also in his poetry, that poets should be adequately paid, that it would be folly
to write except for money, they must sell what they write to the highest bidder.

The lyric has a rich texture and there are echoes of a number of earlier as well as
contemporary poets. However, it is W.B. Yeats of whom we are the most of all D.R.
Howard has suggested that the poem is intended as an answer to Yeats’ Sailing to
Byzantium. In that poem, Yeats divorces himself from “the young in one another’s arms”
in order to pursue “monuments of unaging intellect ,” the possibility of permanence in a
world of flux . Thomas on the other hand takes lovers as central to his art, and the
phrase ‘sullen art” may be a reply to Yeats’s demand that “soul clap its hands and sing”.
‘The suggestion’, says Clark Emery “has much merit.” Nothing could be of more alien to
Thomas’s spirit than to deny the flesh, love, and lovers for a mechanical singing bird.
Nothing more arouses his interest than “those dying generations” which were the
objects of Yeats’s irony. And his sympathy is never with Carlylean heroes past and
present, but with “the scorned – the rejected.” Keats forlorn, or Sweeney beset, among
the nightingales, is to his taste as Agamemnon, or to take a trio of poets of a certain
towering aloofness – Milton, Eliot, Yeats could never be, however much he respected
their greatness. The parallel between Keats and Thomas is also close. Both were
precocious young men; both extraordinarily sensuous; both outsiders – the one
Cockney, the other Welsh; both were sensitive about their intellectual deficiencies;
neither was, therefore, ever free from an uneasiness – Keats in the company of
Wordsworth or Shelley, Thomas, with Eliot and his compeers; each felling-off of his
powers; each could therefore speak without a false humility of having ‘writ in water’.
Keats, more burningly ambitious than Thomas, made his effort, with Hyperion, to join the
immortals. He knew he had failed. Thomas, perhaps more self-aware, tried neither the
epic nor the tragic vein. He did not hope for the intellectual aristocracy in his audience
and was distinctly uncomfortable when their representatives appeared. His aim was
lower.
It is a short lyric in two stanzas, with well marked rhymes which impart an air of finality
and assurance to the lyric. The syllabic count is almost regular. The basic pattern in
each stanza is a series of seven syllabic lines broken only in line fourteen. The final line
of each stanza has only 6 syllables. The poem is practically devoid of imagery and
decoration, but it is has epigrammatic terseness and its texture is rich, as already
pointed out above, with verbal echoes from a number of poets