To be encompassed by the brilliant earth

Breathing on all sides pungently

Into her vegetation’s lapping mouths

Must feel like such encroachment

As edges off your nerves to mine,

The hemming contact that’s so trammelled

By love or look,

In death or out of death,

Glancing from the yellow nut,

Eyeing from the wax’s tower,

Or, white as milk, out of the seeping dark,

The drooping as you close me in

A world of webs

I touch and break,

I touch and break.             

This is a horrifying poem in many ways. Although written from a profoundly pagan point of view (that life is a sort of force which of its own runs through all living things and our life is ultimately impersonal and not our own), the moral of the poem is as critical of lust as the most passionate turn or burn preacher. 

The poem begins with a phrase which may be an imagining which may be a wish or a fear. 

To be encompassed by the brilliant earth.

I hope to be, I fear to be, I may be; I am fascinated by, or I am in terror of, this encompassing.  The use of the verb “encompassed” provides the ambiguity. For instance, if we change the verb to “buried” or “crushed,” we could easily see the negative. If we read “blanketed” of “cradled,” we could see this as a good. But encompassed denotes a state without providing a connotation to relieve the ambiguity.

Moreover, there is an ambiguity as to whether the poet considers his own, another’s, or the abstracted idea, of the state of encompassing. 

The phrase the brilliant earth is one of the paradoxical turns one finds in Dylan. The earth by nature is not “brilliant”: it does exhibit light. There are a few ways we could take this phrase.

The easiest way to “understand” the phrase would be to reject it as nonsense. If we were to find this phrase in a textbook on dirt we would have to think of the phrase as somehow in error. 

However, since we are reading a work of creative literature, and a poem by Dylan Thomas in particular, we charitably consider this as a deliberately paradoxical phrase; perhaps along the lines of a Zen koan. If this phrase is not to be taken as a deliberate contradiction nor a “literal” description of glowing dirt, what could Dylan’s point be?

It might be there is a sort of “brilliance” in the earth which is not immediately the subject of apprehension. It might be a metaphorical brilliance: The earth is living or active in some sense and exudes something which could be described as “brilliant”. It might be a reference to the effect upon the poet: somehow the earth has made in me the sensation that the earth is brilliant.

We could also conclude that “earth” has reference which is not precisely inert dirt in the field. What this reference could be is unclear at this point. 

Of course, the metaphorical use could entail both elements. 

And thus at the end of the first line, we are in a state of necessary ambivalence. 

The line scans as follows:

to BE encompassed [pause] by the BRILLiant EARTH

The two halves of the line are held together by the alliteration of “B” on either side of the pause: Be Brilliant

The second line

Breathing on all sides pungently

This line connects to the prior line as follows:

The “B” of “Breathing. This point is emphasized by the accent on the first syllable. 

The entire line also functions as an appositive to the “brilliant earth”: The “brilliant earth [is] breathing.”

The description of the earth “breathing” complicates the problem of the first line in describing earth. So we now know the earth is “brilliant” and “breathes”. How this could be so is not yet clear. But by the addition of “breathing” tells us that somehow the earth is alive. The brilliance is just glowing dirt: this living entity.

The prepositional phrase, “on all sides” complements “encompassing”. This does not answer who is encompassed by the earth (the poet or another).

Someone is now on all sides experiencing a living, breathing earth. Moreover, this experience is intimate: the earth is close enough, one can experience this “pungent” breathing.

Into her vegetation’s lapping mouths

Where does the vegetation have a mouth? Does the earth breathe into the roots or the leaves? 

This also changes the tenor of the adverb “pungently”. Rather than emphasizing the earth’s bad breath, it seems to emphasize the pointedness of the earth’s action. 

The vegetation is pictured as an animal lapping at the water: but here, rather than water it is the breathing earth.

At this point, the poem takes a dramatic turn:

Must feel like such encroachment

As edges off your nerves to mine,

The relationship between the mouths and the breathing earth is pictured as an “encroachment”: it is a forcible entrance, or a least an unwelcomed entrance. 

At this point, the metaphorical language of a brilliant, breathing earth becomes another step removed from experience: the earth and the plants mouths are not “your nerves to mine”. 

The first clause, “as edges off” modifies the “encroachment”. 

We have now moved from actual plants and earth to the poet and someone else. Precisely what is taking place here is not exactly clear, but the relationship between this poet and, we can presume at this point, a lover is extraordinarily intimate. 

This also raises a theme which runs through other poems by Thomas such as 

The force that through the green fuse drives the flower 

Drives my green age

This concept of there being a continuous correlation between the life of plants and nature and his own life. Because of this theme, it is perhaps wrong to understand the current poem (To be encompassed ….) is not using the language of earth and plants as merely a conceit: a metaphor to dress-up the relationship between the poet and lover, but rather to express something which Thomas contends is inherent in the relationship.

He is pointing out something which is intimate, but also (he sees) as impersonal. Walt Whitman makes a similar argument in Song of Myself:

Urge and urge and urge, 

Always the procreant urge of the world.

It is as if Thomas is speaking to her and removing the personal him and her from the equation and contending for a deeply impersonal intimacy. He even describes this intimacy as something which “love” or “look” (there knowledge and notice of one-another) as trammeling upon the intimacy:

The hemming contact that’s so trammelled

By love or look,

The contact is not profound, rather it is “hemmed.”  The intimacy of the two is the intimacy of plants in the soil. It is not even animalistic, but rather vegetable. It does not sound passionate or even desirable: breath is pungent, the intimacy an encroachment. The brilliant earth thus comes back not as a joyous brilliance but rather a description of energy: as if life were a thing like gravity which just acted without personality.

The trammeling is further explicated in these lines:

In death or out of death,

Glancing from the yellow nut,

Eyeing from the wax’s tower,

Or, white as milk, out of the seeping dark,

The exact references of these lines are unclear to me. The first line “In death or out of death” make sense, because this force is not something confined to persons, but a force which courses through nature with or without Thomas’s existence. 

I can’t make out the “yellow nut,” unless it is some reference to birth in the way that a wax tower which would melt with heat is a reference to death. That life-death-life movement would make sense of nut and wax, and then white seeping from dark: a force of life which moves through opposites and moves through people without any person being their own life.

The poem ends with this horrifying lines:

The drooping as you close me in

A world of webs

I touch and break,

I touch and break.

The lover’s closeness is “drooping” she closes in on him in a manner which he describes as “a world of webs”. This intimacy is no loving relationship, rather it is a black widow coming into the kill the male with whom she mates. This moment of procreation will he is death:

“I touch and break.” 

To touch her is to be destroyed. 

This moment of dispassionate lust, a lust which is independent of either the poet or the woman, results in profound disillusionment. It something forced upon them both, something which love or true intimacy can only ‘trammel’ upon. They are forced into this “encroachment” which overwhelms them. In the end, she comes to him as a spider who destroys him as soon as she touches him. 

Thomas decidedly does not call this lust “sin”: sin would be too volitional an understanding. But the result of this lust is certainly death. 

This then leads us back to the first line of the poem: On the first run through, one lover encompassing the other is the “brilliant earth”. The brilliant earth is the human being made of earth and animated by the “green force”. But here at the end, we return to the earth and now it is a tomb: he has been buried. The procreative act is also the entombing action. Life runs through the human, running the puppet from life to death to life and so on.

So I hated life

Because what is done under the sun is grievous to me

For all is vanity

And a striving after wind.

Eccl. 2:17