¹ Dylan Thomas, “Answers to an Enquiry,” New Verse, xi (October 1934), 8. Twenty-two writers answered these six questions in two issues of the magazine. Thomas reprinted his answers as “Replies to an Enquiry,” Quite Early One Morning (New York, 1954), pp. 188–190.

² This and the following remarks in the letter quoted are in the second edition of Henry Treece's Dylan Thomas: Dog Among the Fairies, 2nd ed. (New York, 1956), p. 37n.

³ Dylan Thomas, 28 March 1945, Dylan Thomas Letters to Vernon Watkins, ed. Vernon Watkins (New York, 1957), p. 126.

⁴ Treece, p. 37n. Ralph Maud has tested Thomas' rationalization of his own creative act by applying to several of his poems the notion of images breeding each other; this literal application of Thomas' theory proves its validity. Entrances to Dylan Thomas' Poetry (Pittsburgh, 1963), pp. 26–30.

⁵ After noticing the metamorphoses in several Thomas poems, I found stimulating discussions and background surveys in Sister M. Bernetta Quinn's The Melamorphic Tradition in Modern Poetry (New Brunswick, N. J., 1955), pp. 3–4, 9 and 11–12. I am surprised, however, that she did not use the poetry of Dylan Thomas as one of her primary examples.

⁶ Treece, Elder Olson (Olson, The Poetry of Dylan Thomas, Chicago, 1954), G. S. Fraser and Geoffrey Grigson (“Dylan Thomas” and “How Much Me Now Your Acrobatics Amaze” respectively in A Casebook on Dylan Thomas, ed. John Malcolm Brinnin, New York, 1960), and William York Tindall (A Reader's Guide to Dylan Thomas, New York, 1962) are some who attempt to list Thomas' techniques. Ralph Maud discovers additional ones in Entrances.

⁷ I qualify my statement because it contradicts Thomas' denial of an influence—he offered as proof the fact that he did not know Welsh. (See the 9 December 1952 letter to Stephen Spender in the Houghton Library of Harvard University.) Though critics muster on both sides of the issue, the discussion below will show that Thomas had at least heard of such patterns and apparently decided to do something similar in a few of his poems. It is probable that a writer who had heard of the astonishing complexity of these conventions would think of amusing himself with such attenuated rhyming as we find in the “Author's Prologue.”

⁸ Thomas completed the poem during his harrowing months in the V-2 rocket raids of wartime London. (See Letters to Vernon Watkins, p. 125.) It is curious in this connection that the crucial image in the poem is the arrival of the she bird, a kind of phoenix that brings both death and resurrection to the man.

⁹ Though Tindall's Shakespeare scholar is unable to find any “remarkable comparison” between Thomas' poem and Shakespeare's play (Guide to Dylan Thomas, p. 210), the following discussion will show that they have in common “love-transformation” such as Florizel recalls in Jupiter, Neptune, and Apollo (iv.iv.25–35) and that both works contain the flowers of winter (iv.iv). I shall subsequently discuss more significant comparisons.

¹⁰ West British dialect. Unless otherwise indicated, the sources for linguistic information, as well as some folk phrases, are The Oxford English Dictionary and The English Dialect Dictionary. Since puns are crucial in Thomas' use of language as gesture (as in R. P. Blackmur's phrase), I shall note some of his uses of dialect and Welsh words to form puns. Ralph Maud has already demonstrated his use of dialect words in “Obsolete and Dialect Words as Serious Puns in Dylan Thomas,” ES, xli (February 1960), 1–2.

¹¹ This form of cynghanedd (“harmony”) is the internal rhyme of an accented or unaccented syllable in the first half of the line with an accented penultimate syllable, which limits this device to lines with feminine endings. Additional expositions of the intricacies of cerdd dafod (“tongue song”) in Welsh poetry can be found in Gwyn Williams, An Introduction to Welsh Poetry (London, 1953), in Thomas Parry, A History of Welsh Literature, trans. H. Idris Bell (Oxford, 1955), and below.

¹² Henry Treece, Dylan Thomas: Dog among the Fairies (London, 1949), pp. 81–84. Jones summarizes critical discussion of the problem in “Dylan Thomas and Welsh,” Dock Leaves (Dylan Thomas no.), v (Spring 1954), 25.

¹³ Awdl gywydd is a couplet of seven syllables in which the end of the first line rhymes with a sound at the pause near the middle of the second line. The last syllable of the second line then carries the main rhyme of the whole. This is a measure scorned by the superior bards, but it is preserved in the hymnology and popular poetry of modern Wales. Though Thomas' lines do not follow the second rule, the basic intertwining of lines still results—there is still the dialogic statement and answer. The combination of this and many other approximations of bardic forms in Thomas' poetry insist on some sort of influence rather than accidental results of poetic experiments in English poetry.

¹⁴ Cyrch-gymeriad, defined as “catchword,” is the linking of lines or stanzas by repetition of a word or use of a word that alliterates with a preceding one. The specialized device of cyngogion, the repetition of the first words of the poem in the last words of the poem (approximated by Thomas' uses of folds), helps to unify “A Winter's Tale.” Cymeriad is the general term for three kinds of “correspondence” in Welsh poetry: correspondence of sense—meaning repeated from one line to the next; alliterative correspondence—two or more lines begun with the same consonant; and correspondence in cynghanedd—the beginnings of lines forming verbal correspondence.

¹⁵ In the traditional Welsh form of cynghanedd gyslain groes, each consonant in the first part of the line is answered in the second, in the same order, while the vowels and end consonants of each half-line differ. Thomas also approximates the more complicated cynghanedd sain, a three-part line in which the last syllables of the first and second parts rhyme and the second part alliterates with the third by groes (following another example of cyrch-gymeriad):

Horses, centaur dead, turn and tread the drenched white Thomas gratuitously slant-rhymes another syllable in the first third of the line with one in the last third.

¹⁶ Ralph Maud correctly treats this passage as an example of Thomas' familiarity with and use of dialect by quoting from The Dialect Dictionary: the “North Countryman” in 1871 applied “‘grain or grains’ … ‘to a variety of objects, the leading character of all of which is division or separation — a stream divides or forks into two (or more) grains, so does a limb or a branch of a tree, so does the human form at the groin … ‘” “Obsolete and Dialect Words,” p. 1.

¹⁷ Both of these images are literally possible—-when the fishes are seen through the ice and when the frozen birds have dropped into the deep snow.

¹⁸ Perhaps “spun” even suggests death and rebirth in the insect orders—the cocoon of the pupa. “A grief ago” contains a similar association of flower bud (here also a bullet) and insect chrysalis:

¹⁹ Thomas Parry postulates about Welsh poetry “that sound is as important as sense; that metre and cynghanedd, the whole framework of verse, are as much a part of the aesthetic effect as what is said. … The tendency of modern criticism has been to consider primarily the thought expressed in a poem” (History of Welsh Literature, p. 48). While Parry's “as important” is a modest claim, there is no question that the Welsh bardic tradition places more emphasis on sound patterns than do other poetic traditions.

²⁰ Henry Treece discusses this epithet in How I See Apocalypse (London, 1946), and Dylan Thomas (London, 1949), pp. 106–109.

²¹ “Replies to an Enquiry,” p. 188.