To Day This Insect - Analysis

The insect as a tiny hinge that swings open myth

Dylan Thomas begins with something almost comically small: this insect. But the poem’s central claim is that the smallest present-tense fact can trigger the whole machinery of story—Eden, monsters, scripture, tragedy—until language itself becomes a kind of cosmic crime scene. The speaker breathes the world I breathe and immediately slides from the physical into the symbolic, as if the act of noticing the insect forces him to admit that his mind lives by making fables. What follows is not a stable allegory but a pressure test: can a mind tell stories without turning life into a staged fall, a rehearsed catastrophe, a familiar myth?

The tone is feverish and self-aware. Even in the opening, the speaker sounds both proud and guilty: his symbols have outelbowed space, but that expansion comes with violence. The poem reads like a confession of what imagination does when it can’t leave the world alone.

Writing as violence: the “guillotine” in the sentence

The first section makes composition feel physical and harsh. The speaker admits how long it takes him to nudge the sentence, and that tiny verb matters: the sentence is not a transparent window but something heavy that must be shoved into place. In trust and tale he has divided sense—a phrase that makes meaning sound like something split by a blade. Then the blade appears outright: Slapped down the guillotine. This is not just melodrama; it’s the poem’s accusation that to make a story is to cut living continuity into a head and tail, an ending and a beginning.

The consequence is named with startling bluntness: Murder of Eden and green genesis. Eden and genesis are supposed to be origins, innocence, growth. Yet the poet’s symbolic act makes them witnesses to their own death. The tension here is sharp: the speaker needs fable to speak at all, but he also sees that fable kills something immediate—like the insect itself, which could have remained simply an insect instead of becoming a lever for cosmology.

“Plague” and “promise”: the fable that poisons and guarantees

Thomas plants two refrain-like verdicts that contradict each other: The insect certain is the plague of fables, and later The insect fable is the certain promise. The poem turns on that double certainty. Fable is a plague because it spreads, infects, multiplies; once you tell one story, everything begins to look like a lesson, an omen, an emblem. But fable is also a promise—perhaps the only promise the mind can honestly make—because it is how humans keep time, preserve desire, and build a shared world from private breath.

These two statements frame the poem’s emotional logic. The speaker isn’t deciding between them; he’s trapped between them. The insect is both the raw fact that provokes story and the proof that story can never be merely innocent.

The monster in the garden: serpent, crocodile, chrysalis

The middle section unfolds like a nightmare bestiary staged on the boundary of Eden. The monster arrives with a serpent caul, an image that fuses birth and curse: a caul is a birth-membrane, but the serpent drags it into the territory of temptation. The creature is Blind in the coil, scramming around a blazing outline, as if it can only circle the shape of paradise without seeing it. It even Measures his own length on the garden wall: self-knowledge becomes measurement, limitation, an anxious audit of one’s body against a boundary.

Then comes a grotesque time-slip: A crocodile before the chrysalis. The normal metamorphosis story—caterpillar to chrysalis to wing—gets reversed and corrupted, as though predation precedes transformation. The poem keeps juxtaposing innocence with something ancient and armored: children's piece sits beside crocodile; the garden sits beside siege. Even the “winged” image is compromised: Winged like a sabbath ass makes flight ridiculous, stubborn, burdened by religious caricature. If the insect suggests delicate life, the poem answers with creatures that make delicacy feel unsafe.

Jericho blown on Eden: stories as acts of conquest

One of the poem’s most startling moves is to bring the trumpet-blast of Jericho into the garden: blows Jericho on Eden. Jericho is a story of walls falling under sacred sound; Eden is the story of a fall under desire and disobedience. By yoking them, Thomas suggests that myth does not merely describe loss; it actively performs it, like a siege engine. The poem’s earlier guillotine now becomes a wider violence: not just cutting a sentence, but toppling a world.

This is where the tone hardens into something like indictment. The speaker doesn’t sound serenely prophetic; he sounds alarmed by the power of narrative to annex everything it touches. Even the phrase Uncredited hints at theft: the story takes over, but no one admits authorship, no one is held responsible.

Death’s catalogue and the seduction of “the ageless voice”

In the last section, the poem opens its gates to a crowded procession: Death: death of Hamlet, nightmare madmen, John's beast, Job's patience. These are not casual references; they are pressure points in Western storytelling—tragedy, apocalypse, suffering, endurance. Death becomes a sort of anthology, a set of roles the imagination can always recast. Even the surreal image An air-drawn windmill on a wooden horse blends Don Quixote’s futile combat with Trojan deception: battling illusions while being smuggled by one.

Then the poem gives us a voice that sounds like myth speaking for itself: Adam I love, love is endless. It’s intoxicating, because it promises that story will outlast bodies: No tell-tale lover has an end more certain. Yet the promise is edged with menace. Everyone becomes a sweetheart hung on a tree of stories; devotion is indistinguishable from being pinned into a legend. The voice claims a cross of tales behind a fabulous curtain, as if religion and theater have merged into one stage where love and death are endlessly replayed.

A sharpened question the poem forces on the speaker

If the insect is both plague and promise, what is the speaker really asking us to trust: the living creature at his feet, or the ageless voice that can make any creature into evidence? When he calls Eden’s loss a Murder, is he accusing history and religion—or accusing the storyteller who cannot look without turning sight into a sentence and a sentence into a fall?

What “to-day” means when myth won’t stay in the past

The title’s insistence on to-day matters: this is not a poem content to archive old stories. It stages the moment those stories re-enter the present through perception and language. The insect is the day’s fact, but the speaker’s mind makes that fact testify to Eden, Jericho, Hamlet, Job. The poem’s final tension remains unresolved on purpose: we are made of fables, and those fables both keep us alive and destroy what we touch. In Thomas’s vision, the imaginative act is never neutral—it is a breath that becomes a verdict, a promise that arrives as a plague.