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Modern English Grammar English 2126		Contact Form

Making Meaning through Grammar:
"This Bread I Break" by Dylan Thomas

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Introductory: The Poem

Twenty-five Poems, published in 1936, contains a remarkable collection of poems that highlight Thomas' morbidity. Usually read as a lyric decrying man's destructive nature even when in the act of creating bread or wine, many read “This Bread I Break” as a statement of man's destructive influence on the world or as a poem exploring how the act of creation entails destruction as well. Indeed, others of the Twenty-five Poems include verses on the loss of life and faith, loss of innocence, loss of youth, and the loss of vigor and vitality. Loss is the central theme.

However, by examining the grammatical patterns in the poem, I think we can find more interpretations are possible, and perhaps, better.

This Bread I Break
Dylan Thomas

This bread I break was once the oat,
This wine upon a foreign tree
Plunged in its fruit;
Man in the day or wind at night
Laid the crops low, broke the grape's joy.

Once in this wine the summer blood
Knocked in the flesh that decked the vine,
Once in this bread
The oat was merry in the wind;
Man broke the sun, pulled the wind down.

This flesh you break, this blood you let
Make desolation in the vein,
Were oat and grape
Born of the sensual root and sap;
My wine you drink, my bread you snap.

Verb Forms in the Poem

Thomas employs twelve verb lexemes in the poem, with break/broke being the most prominent of the group:

1. break/broke [4 times, twice present tense, twice past tense]
2. be [3 times, twice as linking verb, once as auxiliary]
3. plunged (in)
4. laid (low)
5. knocked (in)
6. decked
7. pulled (down)
8. let
9. make
10. born
11. drink
12. snap

Semantic patterns and Agency in the Verbs

We notice several important semantic trends in Thomas' choice of verbs:

1. As a group, the verbs strongly suggest violence, destruction.
   
   
2. In four verb phrases, Thomas is deliciously ambiguous about whether we should interpret the verb as a particle verb or as a single transitive verb followed by an adverbial:
   
   Plunged in its fruit
   Knocked in the flesh
   Laid the crops low
   pulled the wind down
   
   Notice how the particle verb interpretation even more strongly suggests violence.
   
   
3. There is agency attributed to many of the violent verbs: Man broke the sun, pulled the wind down.
   
   
4. Generally, time reference in the verbs shifts from the past in stanzas one and two to the present in stanza three. There is a strong sense of the immediate present at the end of the poem: My wine you drink, my bread you snap.
   
   
5. Agency shifts at the end from the generic man to a specific you in the last stanza of the poem. I don't think this a generic you (a reference to people in general) as in you should register early to beat the rush, but rather, I think the narrator is speaking directly to a specific (second) person.

Grammatical Person in the Poem

Consideration of verb forms leads us to note the use of grammatical person in the poem. Thomas uses all three persons:

1. First person I, my
   
   
2. Second person you
   
   
3. Third person Man, tree, oat, vine, grape, flesh, wind, sun, bread, etc.

The majority of the poem employs the third person, as the first person narrator describes what man does to the other third person nouns (through those verbs of violence).

There is a first person narrative frame that begins and ends the poem, and the second person – the person to whom the narrator is speaking – appears only at the poem's last stanza.

Adverbials in the Poem

Consideration of verb forms leads us also think about adverbials, because we noted that there is a shift in time through the course of the poem, and adverbials too can mark time in the clause. The majority of adverbials refer to place. There are five adverbials referring to time, and of those five, one is prominent – once – in bold italics at right.

Notice that once, like all the adverbials, occurs only in the first two stanzas, the stanzas that refer to the past. No adverbial occurs in the third stanza, the stanza referring to the present. Also note that once suggests a singularity – a unique time or condition – that seems only to have occurred in the past and is no longer possible in the present. Again, the theme of loss.

Nouns in the Poem

Of the poem's thirty nouns, nearly all occur more than once, which is normal in coherence written English. The nouns do tend to cluster semantically, however:

1. crops/oat/bread realize the ‘bread' lexical group, and
   
   
2. tree/grape/wine/vine realize the ‘wine' lexical group.

Stanzas two and three particularly reveal a third lexical group, the ‘flesh and blood' cluster:

3. man/flesh/blood/vein

All of the noun groups are predicated to verbs of violence and seem to point toward the noun phrase desolation in the vein in the last stanza – a noun phrase that contains two of the very few nouns that occur only once in the poem.

Adjectives in the Poem

Consideration of nouns leads us to consider the noun's modification. There are only four adjectives in the poem, evenly distributed throughout, and generally positive, earthy, and vital. They present a sharp contrast to the violence of the verb forms and the destructiveness suggested by the agency of Man. They seems to suggest a contrast between the beauty and vitality of the natural world and the destructiveness of man's activity.

Here, I believe lies the origins of the reading of “This Bread I Break” as an ecological poem or as a poem of creation versus destruction. If we combine sense we gain from the noun clusters above with the additional information we glean from the adjectives, we can easily see why many readers interpret this poem as an exploration of the irony that all human creation depends on nature's destruction.

Noncanonical Word Order in the Poem

Although the poem seems to highlight contrasts throughout, between man and nature, creation and destruction, the past and the present, there are clues in Thomas' use of word order, especially noncanonical (unusual) word order, that lead us to link the noun lexical groups that we noted earlier. Remembering that clause-initial and clause final positions are especially important, remembering how the principle of front-focus can help a writer add emphasis to a particular constituent in a clause, consider the last line of the poem: My wine you drink, my bread you snap. Those two clauses each have marked themes, fronting and emphasizing two noun phrases My wine and my bread. Those clauses use OSV patterns, rather than the canonical SVO pattern.

Those are the only clauses that do; however, Thomas has been using reduced relative clauses throughout the poem, structures that look on the poetic line to mimic the OSV pattern, because Thomas breaks the line at just the right point to make the reduced relative clauses look like clauses of the OSV pattern. The first line of the last stanza starts with This flesh you break, this blood you let and ends with My wine you drink, my bread you snap:

It seems to me that fronting of these four noun phrase (linking the nouns flesh and blood with wine and bread) is not accidental. After all, Thomas couples this set of lexical items with synonymous verbs as well, break with snap, let with drink. Thirdly, Thomas employs the grammatical device of chiasmus (an inverted relationship between the syntactic elements of parallel phrases). Rather than an accident, Thomas deliberately wants us to associate these noun phrases and to recall the first time these noun phrases were linked in this way in Western culture – the story of the Last Supper. (Chiasmus, by the way, is a form of parallelism that is particularly prominent in biblical texts.)

Building then on the idea of the Last Supper, we can explain all the other grammatical patterns we observed earlier under one unified interpretation. Who is the first person narrator? Jesus. Who is the second person audience he is talking to in that last stanza? The disciples. Why the time shift we see in the verbs and the adverbials? Because this marks the turning point in the biblical story of god's relationship with man – god promises to send the redeemer to atone for man's original sin, etc. What is it that man once had in the past but has no longer? Eden and freedom from sin. Why does the narrator use all those verbs of violence and destruction? Because the narrator knows he is going to be betrayed, he is going to die a gruesome death, it will happen soon, and (if we remember the story in more detail) he was none too pleased with the whole deal.

Sound Patterns in the Poem that Reinforce the Grammatical Analysis

Though not part of the grammatical patterns themselves, it is interesting to note that even the phonemes that Thomas uses support the grammatical/thematic structures in the poem as well. For example, phonemes called stops and affricates (sounds like [p], [b], [d], [t], [k], [g], [ ], [ð], etc.). Stops and affricates are articulated with a sudden explosion of air. Consequently, they are perfect to express ‘point-actions,' actions that are sudden, quick, final, and irreversible in words such as snap, break, plunged, etc.

Similarly, Thomas also loads the poem with fricatives, sounds that are expressed by constricting the passage of air through the oral cavity so that sound is created by friction, as in [f], [v], [ð], [θ], [s], [z], [a], [ ], etc. These sounds are the most strident of the English sound inventory and have a ‘hissing' quality to them. Thus, these sounds are often associated with, or suggest, anger and fear.

Conclusion

Examining the grammatical patterns carefully allows us to build a unified, coherent, meaningful interpretation of the poem that illuminates Thomas' art. In this poem, we can see Thomas using the grammatical resources available to him in the language to construct meaning at many different levels simultaneously. Truly, the best grammarians on the planet are our poets and writers themselves.

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