SOURCE: Balakier, James J. “The Ambiguous Reversal of Dylan Thomas's ‘In Country Sleep.’” Papers on Language & Literature 32, no. 1 (winter 1996): 21-44.

In the following essay, Balakier discusses the conflicted feelings of a father for his daughter in Thomas's “In Country Sleep.”

Among the relatively few father-daughter poems in the “canon,” Dylan Thomas's “In Country Sleep” is striking for its frank portrayal of a caring though conflicted state of fatherhood. Other poems belonging to this diverse lyric sub-genre, such as Jonson's “On my First Daughter,” Wordsworth's “Surprised by Joy,” Yeats's “A Prayer for My Daughter,” are essentially expressions of the poet-father's deep concern for the well-being of his living or dead daughter that have little to do with the existence of the child in her own right. Thomas's poem, an arguably Browningesque dramatic monologue of “a soul in action,” addressed just after story-telling bedtime to the sleeping child, voices the...