AP4
The Classic Essay—Response
You should have come up with something like: “Dylan Thomas explains that he isn’t
writing for money or fame but for lovers, who don’t even care about his writing.”
Now, what is the feel of the poem? What emotions are conveyed? Is there an overall
emotion. Again, think about it a moment.
It’s a tougher question, isn’t it? You probably went back to the poem to look at it again,
thinking, “Just what emotion was I supposed to get? There’s something there, but what?”
You might have picked up on a few items: pride, grief, loneliness, perhaps futility, and
also perhaps the opposite of futility—a sense of purpose. The poem has a truly complex
emotionality to it. Don’t let it scare you off; it only gives you more to write about.
What is the meaning of the poem? Take your literal sense and your emotional sense, and
combine them:
Dylan Thomas’s “In My Craft or Sullen Art” explores the pride, grief, loneliness,
futility, and yet sense of total purpose that comes from the author’s struggle to
write not for fame or for wealth but for “the lovers, their arms round the griefs of
ages.”
So far so good, but this response is just the answer to question 1. Moreover, it isn’t even
a complete answer to question 1, as we haven’t taken a stand on exactly where Thomas’s
exploration has led him.
Now you have the second part of the classic essay question to respond to--how does the
author communicate his meaning. Perhaps in answering this question we can take more
of a stand. How does Thomas bring his emotions [pride, grief, loneliness, futility, and
purpose] into his sense of what writing means to him and (because the essay instructions
demand, we consider it) what does the repetition have to do with it?
Remember, you’re just trying to write a 40 minute essay on a poem you’ve never seen
before. The Readers don’t expect perfection or profound originality. They want to see
you focus on saying something, and then they want you to say it as clearly as you can.
Here’s the complete opening statement and answer to the question of how Thomas
explores his sense of what to him it means to write:
Dylan Thomas’s “In My Craft or Sullen Art” explores the pride, grief, loneliness,
futility, and yet sense of total purpose that come from the author’s struggle to
write not for fame or for wealth but for “the lovers, their arms round the griefs of
ages.” Thomas provides an image of himself, laboring alone “by singing light”
and contrasts this image with an image of self-contained completeness, of lovers
wrapped in each other’s arms, oblivious to all the world and even to his poetry.
By repeating these images, and key words like “moon,” “rage,” and “grief,” he
AP4
The Classic Essay—Response
emphasizes the power of his emotions and the intensity of his need to define
himself and the purpose of his art.
To produce this opening statement we have addressed each of the subparts to the second
question:
a. What are the important images in the work and what do those images suggest?
b. What specific words or short phrases produce the strongest feelings?
c. What elements are in opposition?
What is opposition? Opposition is any pair of elements that contrast sharply. Notice the
image of the author working alone and the image of lovers in each other’s arms. That’s
an opposition. It’s a pairing of images whereby each becomes more striking and
informative when placed against the other. What exactly it means is open to
interpretation and that’s exactly what you should do when you see elements opposed to
each other: interpret. There is no single right answer. The AP Reader will see that your
searching intelligence has found the complexity of the material and is making sense of it.
Opposition also creates tension and mystery. What’s the most mysterious line in “In my
Craft or Sullen Art”? Possibly, it is “And lovers lie abed / With all their griefs in their
arms.” That line alone has an opposition: If they’re lovers, why do they have their griefs
in their arms? You don’t have to resolve this opposition (this is a poem, not a riddle), just
acknowledge it.
A third opposition is also noted in the opening paragraph: Thomas’s sense of futility and
his sense of total purpose. The sense of futility in the poem comes from the statements
that the lovers “pay no praise or wages,” nor do they heed Thomas’s “craft or art.”
Describing the way Thomas gets across his deep sense of purpose is more difficult, even
though it is the stronger of the two impressions. In many ways the entire poem is about
conveying the sense of purpose Thomas feels when writing poetry. An AP essay won’t
get to all of the ways, but it should certainly detail, as requested in the prompt, the role of
repetition.