This Bread I Break
This Bread I Break - meaning Summary
Communion as Natural Cycle
Dylan Thomas frames bread and wine as products of natural growth and harvesting, tracing their origins from oat and grape to the table. The poem links agricultural violence and human consumption, suggesting that breaking bread and drinking wine continue a cycle of transformation where plant life, labor, and flesh interconnect. It reads like a meditation on nourishment, ritual, and the intimate, almost brutal, continuity between nature and human bodies.
Read Complete AnalysesThis bread I break was once the oat, This wine upon a foreign tree Plunged in its fruit; Man in the day or wine at night Laid the crops low, broke the grape's joy. Once in this time wine the summer blood Knocked in the flesh that decked the vine, Once in this bread The oat was merry in the wind; Man broke the sun, pulled the wind down. This flesh you break, this blood you let Make desolation in the vein, Were oat and grape Born of the sensual root and sap; My wine you drink, my bread you snap.
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