The hunchback in the park
A solitary mister
Propped between trees and water
From the opening of the garden lock
That lets the trees and water enter
Until the Sunday sombre bell at dark
Dylan Thomas creates a melancholy tableau with his isolated figure, defined in terms of his physical deformity. Where is his name? Why is he so adrift from community? How do names leave us we wonder, so that we become reduced to an external definition of our identity? It is as if the figure of the hunchback is squinted at by the poet, through his angular outline and shape, nearly out of the corner of the poet’s eye.
His stay in the park is framed by the routine of the day. The ‘solitary mister’ has become part of the park’s rituals and his assigned name is lonely and habitual.’Solitary mister’. The visitors to the park know the hunchback and that he is always alone.
Yet is he also part of the ‘natural’ landscape of the park. He needs the park’s support to survive. It is a place of refuge and the water nourishes him.
The poem is not always clear. There are patches of opacity where we do not know exactly what image is being suggested before us. We are not sure about the connections. Thomas evokes more than he is ever prepared to explain. It is as if he ‘sees’ or hears something and places it before us for its resonance without precisely knowing why it has to be. But it does.
Maybe the hunchback is the poet, with his challenges and innate sense of solitude. Maybe the park is a metaphor for life. Parks were built by men to provide the pastoral/nature in towns and cities. They have boundaries and are open to everyone, the good and the bad. Like human nature they can be defiled and ruined. The simplicity and the basic rhythms of the hunchback’s life are given poignant representation through the careful choices the poet makes in terms of description. Yet the simplicity belies the tragedy of his life. The ‘why’ is absent. The careless cruelty of the truant boys is also evoked. These things just are Thomas says. We live in prisons sometimes, we make prisoners of others, we reduce ourselves and others through neglect and lack of care.
This is a very compassionate poem that avoids sentimentality and refuses social explanation or excuses. It leaves me feeling unsure and sad. Doubtful about what everything in the poem means, but all too aware of the near spectrally drawn figure of the hunchback in the park. It reads like an elegy, almost a prayer, maybe a meditation.
It has that unsettling, most ironic recognition that boys ‘as innocent as strawberries’ can be unnecessarily cruel. A disturbing yet wonderful simile that stretches on and on in its repercussions…..
Eating bread from a newspaper
Drinking water from the chained cup
That the children filled with gravel
In the fountain basin where I sailed my ship
Slept at night in a dog kennel
But nobody chained him up.
Like the park birds he came early
Like the water he sat down
And Mister they called Hey Mister
The truant boys from the town
Running when he had heard them clearly
On out of sound
Past lake and rockery
Laughing when he shook his paper
Hunchbacked in mockery
Through the loud zoo of the willow groves
Dodging the park keeper
With his stick that picked up leaves.
And the old dog sleeper
Alone between nurses and swans
While the boys among willows
Made the tigers jump out of their eyes
To roar on the rockery stones
And the groves were blue with sailors
Made all day until bell time
A woman figure without fault
Straight as a young elm
Straight and tall from his crooked bones
That she might stand in the night
After the locks and chains
All night in the unmade park
After the railings and shrubberies
The birds the grass the trees the lake
And the wild boys innocent as strawberries
Had followed the hunchback
To his kennel in the dark.
ive recently just started this poem and i am absolutley passionate about it i think its a fantastic poem which makes you feel sorry and emotioanlly involved in the poem and you feel this guy whos the `hunch backs` pain and hurt and despair and it leaves you wondering what if its true and your analysis is a fantastic one of this poem xxx
Many thanks for posting on the poem and am very glad you love it. It does make you feel involved as you say and the sadness is very powerful and real. Made me want to go and sort out that park and let the poor chap have a roof too!
We live a stone’s throw from this park … Cwmdonkin Park in Swansea, just up the road from where Dylan lived as a boy. If I may, I have a related question:
In “Under Milk Mood”, Dylan uses characteristics of animals as adjectives for various associated nouns. As, for example, in “the dogs in the wet-nosed yards”, “the cats nap in the slant corners”, and “though moles see fine tonight in the snouting, velvet dingles”. Is there a technical name for this descriptive device?
Thank you.
Many thanks for your message . I think the technique you asked about involves hypallage, specifically the use of the transferred epithet, where the modifying adjective is deliberately shifted to describe the ‘wrong’ noun object. It certainly has the effect of animating the poetic landscape in lively and unusual, even surreal ways.
Martin Thomasson suggested: I think ‘transferred epithet’ is good, although there is also what I think might be known as ‘anthimeria’ or even ‘enallage’. It all depends whether David’s question concerns grammatical function or the uses of animal characteristics. If this latter, I would want to point him towards what I think is a wider device in UMW, where Thomas’s language seems to blur the lines between the human, the animal and the inanimate (see on this last ‘the sea flocks silently away’ or ‘the seal-barking moon’ for example). Think how Lily Smalls’s Mr Right is likened in her dream to a ‘brilliantined trout’ or how ‘the drugged, bedraggled hens at the back door [of Mrs Willy Nilly’s kitchen] whimper and snivel’. It’s as if he wants to give us a kind of animistic sense of Llareggub – the town as a living organism (perhaps a mini-Gaia)? Just a thought.