THIS BREAD I BREAK (By Dylan Thomas)

THIS BREAD I BREAK (by Dylan Thomas)

The poem consists of three five-line stanzas with no rhyme scheme, except for lines 14 and 15. It is centred around the tension existing between the life of nature and human life.

The bread and wine, which constitute the fundamentals of man’s physical survival, were once oat and grape, and lived within the “merry” cycle of natural life. Man’s destructiveness has not only broken “the grape’s joy”, but also broken “the sun” and “pulled the wind down”.

The analogy which the poet establishes between bread and wine, and flsh and blood, takes two different meanings. Firstly it creates a network of internal relationships between what belongs to the world of nature and what is specifically human: if bread is associated with flesh (line 11) also wine is (line 7), but wine is also associated with blood (lines 6 and 11). On the other hand, man’s body – the poet’s body – is defined in terms of “wine” and “bread”. Therefore, the essence of man and nature is the same.

Secondly, the analogy between bread and flesh, and wine and blood, is an obvious allusion to the biblical story of the Last Supper. This allusion confers an even more sacred aspect to the poem, extending the connections between the vegetable world and man to the divinity in the person of Christ.

The poem is then enriched with a further set of meanings .

Nature suffers at man’s hand, but also man does (line 15), in the same way as Christ has accepted to sacrifice Himself for mankind. Thomas employs the grammatical device of chiasmus (lines 11 and 15 ), an inverted relationship between the syntactic elements of parallel phrases, a form of parallelism that is particularly prominent in biblical texts.

The poet seems to point to the violence that is hidden behind the simplest of man’s gestures: breaking the bread.

The poem enacts the dramatic aspect of human existence through

a)  the use of monosyllabic words, most of which contain plosive sounds – p/ t / k / b / d /, - the prevailing sound pattern being one of abruptness and harshness

b)  the repetition of the verb “ break” and the presence of verbs like “snap”, “laid down” “knocked in” with a marked connotation of violence

c)  the almost total absence of adjectives, implying two effects: one, a high density of nouns, all but one concrete nouns, the other a prevalence of images appealing to the senses.

The rhythm created by the repetition of the same structures (lines 1 and 2; lines 6, 8 and 11; lines 15) and the alternation of lines of varying length create expectations that the final rhyming lines fully satisfy.