The Hand That Signed The Paper by Dylan Thomas Part II

The Hand That Signed the Paper



The hand that signed the paper felled a city;
Five sovereign fingers taxed the breath,
Doubled the globe of dead and halved a country;
These five kings did a king to death.

The mighty hand leads to a sloping shoulder,
The finger joints are cramped with chalk;
A goose's quill has put an end to murder
That put an end to talk.

The hand that signed the treaty bred a fever,
And famine grew, and locusts came;
Great is the hand that holds dominion over
Man by a scribbled name.

The five kings count the dead but do not soften
The crusted wound nor pat the brow;
A hand rules pity as a hand rules heaven;
Hands have no tears to flow.

Dylan Thomas



The hand that signed the paper is a work where content is much more important than form.

There are many interpretations hidden in the words of this author, as I will analyze later, because the form of the poem is very simple: it has four stanzas where there are four verses in each one.



In a linguistic analysis of the poem, we can identify the use of certain cataphoric, anaphoric and homophoric items. For instance, the use of “the” in stanza 1(the hand, the paper, the breath and the globe) is cataphoric, while the subsequent uses or “the” are defining, so they are anaphoric. Examples are: The mighty hand or The five kings.

The use of “the” in the dead in line 1 of stanza 4 is homophoric and anaphoric since the phrase the dead could be said to get an universal application. Also we have in the poem the use of participant relations where parts of the body and certain elements are made to act as if on their own volition. For instance, in the title of the work, The hand that signed the paper, the poet presents the hand as if acting independently of its owner whose brain must have given the signal before the actual signing was done. Also, we have fingers taxed the breath, A hand that rules pity, a hand that rules heaven, etc.

On the other hand, there is a preponderance of the nominal group in the poem, and most of these nominal groups are inanimate: The hand that signed the paper, The globe of dead (stanza 1, line 3), a scribbled name (stanza 3, line 4), etc.

Synonymy is another lexical device used in the poem: did a king to death (stanza 2, line 4) and murder (stanza 2, line 3) can be said to be identical meaning. Also, paper and treaty can be said to be synonymous. The use of fingers and hand is an instance of hyponymy. The implication of this is that the poet uses them as elements of foregrounding to lay emphasis on the actual message of the poem.



The rhyme is unique for the whole poem: ABAB. The vocabulary used by Thomas is not very complicated, but there are some words difficult to understand even for English students, as goose (line 7), locusts (line 10) or scribbled (line 12).



As I have said before, this text of Thomas is full of words with double meaning that make this poem an excellent portrait of what happens when the (hand of a) man has got the power to initiate and to end a war with a simple sign in an insignificant piece of paper. This is shown in a masterly way in lines 7 and 8: A goose’s quill has put end to murder/ That put an end to talk.

Thomas does not use the term death, even it would be a more appropriate word for a poem which talks about war and its consequences, but he uses murder to emphasize the dramatic effect of death, the only way of not finding death in a natural way. This two lines are, in my opinion, the most brilliant ones in the whole poem.



In the line 2, Five sovereign fingers taxed the breath, Thomas shows the fingers of the hand as kings, as powerful figures; we can see this again later, two lines further down. The expression taxed the breath is very good to explain how difficult it is to survive in a war, because signing that paper means killing a lot of innocent people.



The second stanza begins with a reference to God, to divine power: The mighty hand leads to a sloping shoulder: God is Almighty, that hand can be so mighty as God.

In lines 9 and 10 (The hand that signed the treaty bred a fever,/ And famine grew, and locusts came:). It makes reference to plagues that people who are physically and psychologically injured in a war have to endure.


Great is the hand that holds dominion over/ Man by a scribbled name. Here the writer criticizes the power of bureaucracy. Is it possible that a man, for having signed a piece of paper, had in his hands the destiny of millions of men, women and children?



The last stanza is a return to terms explained before: Thomas comes back to show the fingers of the hand as individual kings, as powerful men (The five kings), and also comes back to compare the hand of the man with God’s hand: A hand rules pity as a hand rules heaven.

The Hand That Signed The Paper by Dylan Thomas

The Second Coming Part III

"The Second Coming" is a poem by William Butler Yeats first printed in The Dial (November 1920) and afterwards included in his 1921 verse collection Michael Robartes and the Dancer. The poem uses religious symbolism to illustrate Yeats' anguish over the apparent decline of Europe's ruling class, and his occult belief that Western civilization (if not the whole world) was nearing the terminal point of a 2000-year historical cycle.

The poem was written in 1919 in the aftermath of the First World War.[1] However, the various manuscript revisions of the poem refer to the French and Irish Revolutions as well those of Germany and Russia; as a result, it is unlikely that the poem was solely inspired by the Russian Revolution of 1917, which some claim Yeats viewed as a threat to the aristocratic class he favored.[citation needed]

Early drafts also included such lines as: "And there's no Burke to cry aloud no Pitt," and "The good are wavering, while the worst prevail."[citation needed]

The sphinx or sphinx-like beast described in the poem had long captivated Yeats' imagination. He wrote the Introduction to his play The Resurrection, "I began to imagine [around 1904], as always at my left side just out of the range of sight, a brazen winged beast which I associated with laughing, ecstatic destruction", noting that the beast was "Afterwards described in my poem 'The Second Coming'". However, there are some differences between the two characters, mainly that the figure in the poem has no wings.

Critic Yvor Winters has observed, "…we must face the fact that Yeats' attitude toward the beast is different from ours: we may find the beast terrifying, but Yeats finds him satisfying – he is Yeats' judgment upon all that we regard as civilized. Yeats approves of this kind of brutality."

Manuscript variations can be found in Yeats, William Butler. Michael Robartes and the Dancer Manuscript Materials. Thomas Parkinson and Anne Brannen, eds. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1994.


The Poem

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

[edit] Origins of terms

The word gyre used in the poem's first line is drawn from Yeats's book A Vision, which sets out a theory of history and metaphysics which Yeats claimed to have received from spirits. The theory of history articulated in A Vision centers on a diagram composed of two conical spirals, one situated inside the other, so that the widest part of one cone occupies the same plane as the tip of the other cone, and vice versa. Around these cones he imagined a set of spirals. Yeats claimed that this image (he called the spirals "gyres") captured contrary motions inherent within the process of history, and he divided each gyre into different regions that represented particular kinds of historical periods (and could also represent the psychological phases of an individual's development). Yeats believed that in 1921 the world was on the threshold of an apocalyptic moment, as history reached the end of the outer gyre (to speak roughly) and began moving along the inner gyre.

The lines "The best lack all conviction, while the worst / Are full of passionate intensity" are a paraphrase of one of the most famous passages from Percy Bysshe Shelley's Prometheus Unbound, a book which Yeats, by his own admission, regarded from his childhood with religious awe:

In each human heart terror survives
The ravin it has gorged: the loftiest fear
All that they would disdain to think were true:
Hypocrisy and custom make their minds
The fanes of many a worship, now outworn.
They dare not devise good for man's estate,
And yet they know not that they do not dare.

The phrase "stony sleep" is drawn from the mythology of William Blake. In Blake's poem, Urizen falls, unable to bear the battle in heaven he has provoked. To ward off the fiery wrath of his vengeful brother Eternals, he frames a rocky womb for himself: "But Urizen laid in a stony sleep / Unorganiz'd, rent from Eternity." During this stony sleep, Urizen goes through seven ages of creation-birth as fallen man, until he emerges. This is the man who becomes the Sphinx of Egypt.

In the early drafts of the poem, Yeats used the phrase "the Second Birth", but substituted the phrase "Second Coming" while revising. His intent in doing so is not clear. The Second Coming described in the Biblical Book of Revelation is here anticipated as gathering dark forces that would fill the population's need for meaning with a ghastly and dangerous sense of purpose. Though Yeats's description has nothing in common with the typically envisioned Christian concept of the Second Coming of Christ, as his description of the figure in the poem is nothing at all like the image of Christ, it fits with his view that something strange and heretofore unthinkable would come to succeed Christianity, just as Christ transformed the world upon his appearance.

The "spiritus mundi" (literally "spirit of the world") is a reference to Yeats' belief that each human mind is linked to a single vast intelligence, and that this intelligence causes certain universal symbols to appear in individual minds. Carl Jung's book The Psychology of the Unconscious, published in 1912, could have had an influence, with its idea of the collective unconscious.

[edit] Allusions to the poem

Chinua Achebe titled his most famous novel Things Fall Apart (1958), prefacing the book with the poem's first four lines. Achebe's novel adheres to Yeats' theme by evincing the sudden collapse of African societies in the age of European colonialism.

The hip hop group The Roots titled their 1999 album Things Fall Apart taking the name from the above novel.

The song "Four Winds" on the band Bright Eyes' 2007 album Cassadaga contains the lyrics "a school of meditation built to soften the times/and hold us at the center while the spiral unwinds," and "the sum of man/slouching towards Bethlehem."

The poem is referred to on the tv show Angel, in the fourth episode of season four, titled "Slouching Toward Bethlehem". In the episode, the character Lorne has a psychic vision of something evil coming in the near future, and describes it by saying "do the words 'slouching toward bethlehem' ring any bells?".

The poem is referred to several times directly and indirectly in Stephen King's epic novel The Stand. It is also cited several times in Dan Simmon's novel Hyperion.

Joni Mitchell set the poem to lyrics in her song "Slouching Towards Bethlehem" originally on her Night Ride Home CD.

All but a few lines of the poem have been lines of dialogue on the television show The Sopranos, including one episode in which Dr. Melfi tells Tony "The center cannot hold. The falcon cannot hear the falconer".

Pulitzer Prize-winning author Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. used "The Second Coming" as the epigraph to his book The Vital Center. More than a half-century later, he explained that the poem had been "less of a cliché in 1948" than it had become currently.[2] In 1986 Schlesinger, in The Cycles of American History, again referenced this poem with prophetic paraphrase: "Still, let us not be complacent. Should private interest fail today and public purpose thereafter, what rough beast, its hour come round at last, may be slouching toward Washington to be born?"

Joan Didion's 1968 collection of essays, Slouching Towards Bethlehem, references the poem, as does Nina Coltart's 1993 book Slouching Toward Bethlehem... and Further Psychoanalytic Explorations, as well as numerous popular songs, movies and novels. Conservative judge Robert H. Bork used the poem as an inspiration for the title of his 1996 book Slouching Towards Gomorrah: Modern Liberalism and American Decline. In response, syndicated sex columnist Dan Savage chose Skipping Towards Gomorrah as the title for his 2003 book (ISBN 0-45-228416-3).

Adam Cohen, of the New York Times on 12 February 2007[3] commented how the poem has been used more and more as a metaphor for the war in Iraq.

In the September 20th, 2008 edition of The Economist, the lead article, entitled "What next?", alludes to the poem. The article is about the financial crisis and seems to use the poem as a theme. The second line begins with the phrase "In the widening gyre." The two section headings in the body of the article are also taken from the poem. One is "The blood-dimmed tide." The other is "The centre cannot hold." Also, the cover depicts a whirlpool pulling down the corporate logos of Merrill Lynch, Morgan Stanley, Washington Mutual, HBOS, AIG, Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, Bear Stearns, Northern Rock, Indymac, as well as the Lehman Brothers building and the Charging Bull sculpture.

Similarly, in a New York Times column (Oct. 27, 2008), Paul Krugman compared the ongoing 2008 financial crisis to the anarchy described in the poem. Specifically, he used the widening gyre as the title of his column and as a placeholder for economic feedback loops, suggesting that the falconer would be best represented by Henry Paulson. Krugman concluded the column, "Things continue to fall apart."

In a deleted scene from Oliver Stone's 1995 Movie Nixon, Richard Helms' character played by Sam Waterston recites "The Second Coming" in its entirety to President Nixon played by Anthony Hopkins. It is also alluded to in Stone's 1987 film Wall Street, when Gordon Gekko says to Bud Fox, "So sport, the falcon has heard the falconer."

In an episode of the television show Heroes entitled "The Second Coming", the fictional character Mohinder Suresh narrates the poem "The Second Coming" in its entirety at the conclusion of the episode.

Author Tad Williams, in Chapter 19 of City of Golden Shadow (1996), the first book in his Otherland series, references to the poem when two of the main characters !Xabbu and Irene "Renie" Sulaweyo are discussing !Xabbu's dream premonitions of a foreboding future.

"I am speaking of something greater. There is a poem that I was taught in school-an English poet, I think. It spoke of a beast slouching toward Bethlehem."
"I remember that, sort of. Blood-dimmed tides. Anarchy loose in the world."
He nodded. "An apocalyptic image, I was told. A vision of the end of things.

The Second Coming Part II

The Second Coming

"Mayakovsky" by Frank O'Hara

Now I am quietly waiting for
the catastrophe of my personality
to seem beautiful again,
and interesting, and modern.

The country is grey and
brown and white in trees,
snows and skies of laughter
always diminishing, less funny
not just darker, not just grey.

It may be the coldest day of
the year, what does he think of
that? I mean, what do I? And if I do,
perhaps I am myself again.

The Laughing Heart by Charles Bukowski

your life is your life
don’t let it be clubbed into dank submission.
be on the watch.
there are ways out.
there is a light somewhere.
it may not be much light but
it beats the darkness.
be on the watch.
the gods will offer you chances.
know them.
take them.
you can’t beat death but
you can beat death in life, sometimes.
and the more often you learn to do it,
the more light there will be.
your life is your life.
know it while you have it.
you are marvelous
the gods wait to delight
in you.

-The Laughing Heart; Charles Bukowski