My tears are like the quiet drift
Of petals from some magic rose;
And all my grief flows from the rift
Of unremembered skies and snows.
I think, that if I touched the earth,
It would crumble;
It is so sad and beautiful,
So tremulously like a dream.
My thoughts
Clown in the Moon is undoubtedly sad, but it is not a self-pitying or sentimental kind of sadness; it is gentle and ruminative. Thomas contemplates the world with an emotional intimacy but physical detachment, as though looking on his grief from a distance, and analysing it with wonder. His torment is not violent; the words he uses express softness and tranquil wonder. He describes the earth as ‘tremulous’; ‘like a dream’; he uses verbs like ‘drifting’ and ‘flowing’, there is nothing jarring or sudden here. Thomas’ tears are not sobs; rather, he describes them as “the quiet drift of petals”, an unlikely simile for a sorrow so profound as this.
The word choice in the second line of the poem is interesting. Thomas compares his tears to the petals from “some magic rose” – not “a magic rose”, but “some”. The casualness of phrasing here highlights Thomas’ wonder at the ordinariness of the extraordinary: he is emphasising the rose’s phenomenal yet entirely unremarkable existence, marvelling at the commonness of a world so ‘magic’ and beautiful: how can this be real? How can he be real?
The meter of Clown in the Moon is very cleverly devised. The first verse is very regular, written in iambic tetrameter (with the stress on every other syllable: “my tears are like the quiet drift of petals from some magic rose“). The rhyme scheme, too, is consistent: ‘drift’ rhymes with ‘rift’, ‘rose’ with ‘snows’. The first line of the second stanza continues as though it will follow this pattern, but the second line is truncated and Thomas’ carefully constructed meter deteriorates on the word ‘crumble’. The emphasis, which should be on the last syllable of ‘crumble’, falls instead on the first syllable; the number of syllables in the line, which should be 8, now stops short at 4; and the rhyme scheme, which in the first verse was ABAB, is now more like CDEF, or even CDDE as “crumble” rhymes somewhat with “beautiful”. The fact that this second line is cut short at the moment in which the earth crumbles reinforces the idea of the collapsing world through the mechanics of the poem itself. This abrupt change of meter is sudden but not harsh: like the poet’s fragile world, it crumbles softly into nothingness, like a mirage broken, or an awakening from a supernatural dream.
One theme that runs throughout the poem is the fragility of the world around Thomas. He views the universe as strangely precarious, encapsulating this sentiment perhaps most eloquently in the final line, when he describes the world as “so tremulously like a dream”. He worries that “if [he] touched the earth, it would crumble”: we think of someone tentatively reaching out a hand to break the mirage, or of a clod of soil disintegrating between one’s fingers. The use of the word “tremulously” paints an image of shaking or quivering, emotionally and physically; the unsteadiness of the earth thus mirroring the unsteady emotional state of the poet. His world seems to be a dreamlike illusion waiting to be shattered at any moment: it is an amalgamation of ephemeral things, vague memories and drifting petals, “unremembered skies and snows”. And when Thomas ends, his world will end. It is something so beautiful but so easily breakable, and when it is gone, it is gone. Further, he considers the surreality of the world: how can something so dreamlike, so magical, exist? Perhaps Thomas’ tears are tears of fear, fear of wasting something so wonderfully improbable: it is “sad and beautiful” because its beauty cannot hope to last.
