Dylan Thomas liked to generate poetic sense by the vertical substitution of related lexical items in familiar phrases. The last line of the third verse of ‘The hunchback in the park’ takes ‘out of sight’ and ‘sight and sound’ and produces the original, but oddly familiar, ‘[o]n out of sound’. Five years later, he adapted the same phrase in the 1946 BBC Wales radio broadcast ‘The Crumbs of One Man's Year’, describing a Fifth of November scene in which the Guy ‘was a long time dying on the hill over the starlit fields where the tabby river, without a message, ran on, with bells and trout and tins and bangles and literature and cats in it, to the sea never out of sound.’ Thomas was criticised for the ‘sound and fury signifying nothing’ side of his poetry, as for instance when Bernard Spencer reviewed Twenty-five Poems in the Christmas 1936 issue of New Verse: ‘These poems strike one immediately because of their resonance (sometimes their rhythm is monotonous), their swirl of vigorous images, and, even before they are understood, their flavour of psychology and metaphysics.’ The reviewer adds that they ‘divide more or less clearly into sense and nonsense-poems’, and he concludes by praising ones where the poet's ‘fertility and remarkable sensitiveness to words does really ring the bell’, poems such as ‘The hand that signed the paper’ which ‘has concentrated the peculiar horror and mindlessness of modern politics.’ The distinction is arbitrary and the line hard to draw, but it shadows an evolution in Thomas's work suggested by the poet himself.

‘The hunchback in the park’ might seem such a ‘sense’ poem, unusually straightforward and quotidian in its setting, yet, understood even as it is being read, it too has ‘resonance’ and ‘swirl’ and a ‘flavour of psychology and metaphysics’. It also confuses any simple evolution from ‘nonsense’ to ‘sense’, given that it derives from an early notebook sketch. Reflecting on the May 1932 draft poem, I identify weaknesses to be addressed in the July 1941 rewriting. The aim in this chapter is, then, to relate the character and action of that rewriting process to Thomas's contextualising of the poem in ‘Reminiscences of Childhood’ (1943).