Altarwise by Owl-Light

Altarwise by owl-light in the half-way house

The gentleman lay graveward with his furies;
Abaddon in the hangnail cracked from Adam,
And, from his fork, a dog among the fairies,
The atlas-eater with a jaw for news,
Bit out the mandrake with to-morrows scream.
Then, penny-eyed, that gentlemen of wounds,
Old cock from nowheres and the heaven's egg,
With bones unbuttoned to the half-way winds,
Hatched from the windy salvage on one leg,
Scraped at my cradle in a walking word
That night of time under the Christward shelter:
I am the long world's gentlemen, he said,
And share my bed with Capricorn and Cancer.

Death is all metaphors, shape in one history;
The child that sucketh long is shooting up,
The planet-ducted pelican of circles
Weans on an artery the genders strip;
Child of the short spark in a shapeless country
Soon sets alight a long stick from the cradle;
The horizontal cross-bones of Abaddon,
You by the cavern over the black stairs,
Rung bone and blade, the verticals of Adam,
And, manned by midnight, Jacob to the stars.
Hairs of your head, then said the hollow agent,
Are but the roots of nettles and feathers
Over the groundowrks thrusting through a pavement
And hemlock-headed in the wood of weathers.

First there was the lamb on knocking knees
And three dead seasons on a climbing grave
That Adam's wether in the flock of horns,
Butt of the tree-tailed worm that mounted Eve,
Horned down with skullfoot and the skull of toes
On thunderous pavements in the garden of time;
Rip of the vaults, I took my marrow-ladle
Out of the wrinkled undertaker's van,
And, Rip Van Winkle from a timeless cradle,
Dipped me breast-deep in the descending bone;
The black ram, shuffling of the year, old winter,
Alone alive among his mutton fold,
We rung our weathering changes on the ladder,
Said the antipodes, and twice spring chimed.

What is the metre of the dictionary?
The size of genesis? the short spark's gender?
Shade without shape? the shape of the Pharaohs echo?
(My shape of age nagging the wounded whisper.)
Which sixth of wind blew out the burning gentry?
(Questions are hunchbacks to the poker marrow.)
What of a bamboo man amomg your acres?
Corset the boneyards for a crooked boy?
Button your bodice on a hump of splinters,
My camel's eyes will needle through the shroud.
Loves reflection of the mushroom features,
Still snapped by night in the bread-sided field,
Once close-up smiling in the wall of pictures,
Arc-lamped thrown back upon the cutting flood.
Dylan Thomas
"Altarwise by Owl-Light" is a sequence of ten sonnets. The title is taken from the opening of the first sonnet, which
describes the birth of Christ as producing an era of owl-like wisdom through the light of His altar. The last sonnet
returns to vary the image of "altarwise" as a celebration of the effects Christianity has had on the history of the
world: It has followed "the tales sailor from a Christian voyage/ Atlaswise." In the first sonnet, Dylan Thomas says
that Jesus descended from Adam into the grave of life, the house of the flesh, which he made wise as the owl in
the twilight of history. He is a gentle man who is the sun (Son) moving between the Tropic of Capricorn (the
goat/life) in the Southern Hemisphere, on December 22, and the Tropic of Cancer (the crab/death) in the Northern
Hemisphere, on June 22. He does battle with Abaddon as Satan/death by hanging on the cross by a nail. He is
also the cock who announces a new day, hanging on his cross on one leg like a weather-vane rooster. The
second sonnet continues to present the complexities of the Christian Nativity, when death was made into a
metaphor of spiritual rebirth. The child at a mothers breast is Christ whose mother is self-sacrificing, like the
pelican who feeds her young with her own blood; Christ is the pelican itself, shedding his blood for others. As the
sun/Son, Christ is a child of the Milky Way, and he moves through circles of the heavens, as up a ladder (Jacobs
ladder, made from the crossed bones of death) from the cave of mortality. Sonnet 3 shows the birth of the
sacrificial lamb, the one who pays the debt of death incurred by the old bellwether, the old Adam. The new lamb
butts down death when Christ is sacrificed on Golgotha, the place of skulls. At the crucifixion, Christ speaks out
like Rip Van Winkle, who wakes from a long sleep to become a new person. The next sonnet voices eight
questions asked by the young child (Christ?), ranging from how the Word can be measured to whether God is a
man or a woman. The energy of "genesis" charges a spark of light to show love projected through history, shot
across the great flood of time itself. The Annunciation of Christs coming occurs when the angel Gabriel comes
like a sheriff with two guns in sonnet 5. He plays a trick on death, and he plays cards with time. He pulls three
cards from his sleeve: God, the "king of spots," king over death; Jesus, the jack (of all trades), and Mary, with the
great heart. Gabriel is drunk on his message of salvation, and he tells a strange story of his travels: from Adam
out of Eden, across the ocean as Ahab-Noah-Jonah, to the place of the frozen angel (Satan in Dantes hell of ice),
where death as a "black medusa" dwells and the sirens lure sailors into the Sargasso Sea.
The sixth sonnet is a cartoon of what God did in creating the universe, as described in Genesis, the book of life. It
all began with the "word," as do all poems. The word is also Christ, the Word, who as the great rooster-cock of
love pecks out the eye of the medusadeath. Still, the sirens sing to seduce the Adam of the flesh into their
Sargasso Sea of sin. The genesis of sonnet 6 yields to the gospel of sonnet 7, where the Lords Prayer is
stamped "on a grain of rice," because rice must be planted in water to grow, like birth in the womb and rebirth in
baptism. The leaves of the Bible grow from the tree of Calvary until spiritual wind turns death into life, words into
poetry. Sonnet 8 contemplates the crucifixion and passion of the suffering Christ, as viewed by his mother, Mary,
and by himself. Jesus is the wound of Marys womb, who is herself bent by the wound of the world. The rainbow
of Gods promise to Noah is repeated as the colors of the Trinity arching over the breasts of Mother Nature and
Mary. In the last four lines, Jesus speaks as the thief of time and the physician who heals death. The next sonnet
(9) is a contrast to sonnet 8. Whereas Christian burial is a way to eternal life, Egyptian burial is a futile effort to
preserve the flesh in mummies and arks of parchment. The only resurrection for Egyptian mummies is the work of
scholars who break into their tombs to study their dusty remains. The final sonnet, sonnet 10, shows that the wise
altar of sonnet 1 is the cross of the crucifixion ("the rude, red tree"). Here the Christian voyager has crossed the
atlas to become wise enough not to be wrecked in the "dummy bay" of a false harbor. He is guided by Peter into a
safe harbor, to which he holds the key ("quay"). Peter asks questions about the "tall fish" and the "rhubarb man,"
symbolic images of Jesus, who has restored the garden of Eden for all.

This is a famous sonnet sequence written by Dylan Thomas in about
1937 in north west Ireland in County Donegal. Many Ph. D. Theses
have been written about this sequence alone. The first few lines are as
follows:
Altarwise by owl-light in the half way house The gentleman lay
graveward with his furies, Abaddon in the hangnail cracked from Adam,
And, from his fork, a dog among the fairies, The atlas eater with a jaw
for news, Bit out the mandrake with tomorrows scream.
The density of imagery, metaphor and transposed metaphor has led a
few critics to think that this is surrealism or stream of consciousness
writing. However Thomas always denied this analysis and these few
lines actually describe his own birth and early life. It is full of Biblical
imagery Abaddon is the Hebrew demon of the abyss that brings
about the birth of the poet himself. The hangnail is the piece of loose
skin that sometimes appears next to a fingernail, so Thomas is
descended from the finger of God pointing to Adam as in the Cistine
Chapel. The poet is the dog among the fairies, as in the short story
volume Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dog written about the same
time. He is the junior reporter on The South Wales Evening Post in
Swansea, The atlas eater with a jaw for news. The Biblical mandrake
is what makes barren women fertile, in this case Jacob and Leah.
Tomorrows scream is the first sound of the poet as an infant, and he
foresees his own future. The half way house is purgatory, the
gentleman awaits the decision in the chapel. This is a very densely
metaphorical sequence, probably the most densely packed imagery of
all of Thomas output. The later Thomas is more transparent and
mature, more measured and powerful, no longer the young poet
striving for effect.
This poem...

"represents an important stage in the poet's development, and it has been
the subject of literary controversy ever since its publication in Twenty
Five poems. The starting point of the controversy was Edith Sitwells review
of the book and the subsequent correspondence in the Sunday Times
(September 1936). In the review, which is warmly eulogistic, Edith Sitwell
speaks of 'Altarwise by owl-light' as 'nothing short of magnificent in
spite of the difficulty". This last phrase was seized upon by others and
interpreted as an allegation of obscurity, in the ordinary sense of the
word. Earlier in the same review, however, Edith Sitwell had made clear
what she meant by 'difficulty' : it was, she wrote, 'largely the result of
intense concentration of each phase, packed with meaning, of the fusion
(not confusion) of two profound thoughts'.

Dylan Thomas: The Poems edited and introduced by Daniel Jones J M Dent
Everyman Classics 1985 pg 262

The poem is, incidentally, in the form of a sequence of sonnets.