A Child's Christmas In Wales Poem Rhyme Scheme and Analysis
Rhyme Scheme: A B C DE F D EGHIJ K L M NOPQONQR BSDTUB UV UU| One Christmas was so much like another in those years around the sea town corner now and out of all sound except the distant speaking of the voices I sometimes hear a moment before sleep that I can never remember whether it snowed for six days and six nights when I was twelve or whether it snowed for twelve days and twelve nights when I was six | A |
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| All the Christmases roll down toward the two tongued sea like a cold and headlong moon bundling down the sky that was our street and they stop at the rim of the ice edged fish freezing waves and I plunge my hands in the snow and bring out whatever I can find In goes my hand into that wool white bell tongued ball of holidays resting at the rim of the carol singing sea and out come Mrs Prothero and the firemen | B |
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| It was on the afternoon of the Christmas Eve and I was in Mrs Prothero's garden waiting for cats with her son Jim It was snowing It was always snowing at Christmas December in my memory is white as Lapland though there were no reindeers But there were cats Patient cold and callous our hands wrapped in socks we waited to snowball the cats Sleek and long as jaguars and horrible whiskered spitting and snarling they would slink and sidle over the white back garden walls and the lynx eyed hunters Jim and I fur capped and moccasined trappers from Hudson Bay off Mumbles Road would hurl our deadly snowballs at the green of their eyes The wise cats never appeared | C |
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| We were so still Eskimo footed arctic marksmen in the muffling silence of the eternal snows eternal ever since Wednesday that we never heard Mrs Prothero's first cry from her igloo at the bottom of the garden Or if we heard it at all it was to us like the far off challenge of our enemy and prey the neighbor's polar cat But soon the voice grew louder | D |
| Fire cried Mrs Prothero and she beat the dinner gong | E |
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| And we ran down the garden with the snowballs in our arms toward the house and smoke indeed was pouring out of the dining room and the gong was bombilating and Mrs Prothero was announcing ruin like a town crier in Pompeii This was better than all the cats in Wales standing on the wall in a row We bounded into the house laden with snowballs and stopped at the open door of the smoke filled room | F |
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| Something was burning all right perhaps it was Mr Prothero who always slept there after midday dinner with a newspaper over his face But he was standing in the middle of the room saying A fine Christmas and smacking at the smoke with a slipper | D |
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| Call the fire brigade cried Mrs Prothero as she beat the gong | E |
| There won't be there said Mr Prothero it's Christmas | G |
| There was no fire to be seen only clouds of smoke and Mr Prothero standing in the middle of them waving his slipper as though he were conducting | H |
| Do something he said And we threw all our snowballs into the smoke I think we missed Mr Prothero and ran out of the house to the telephone box | I |
| Let's call the police as well Jim said And the ambulance And Ernie Jenkins he likes fires | J |
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| But we only called the fire brigade and soon the fire engine came and three tall men in helmets brought a hose into the house and Mr Prothero got out just in time before they turned it on Nobody could have had a noisier Christmas Eve And when the firemen turned off the hose and were standing in the wet smoky room Jim's Aunt Miss Prothero came downstairs and peered in at them Jim and I waited very quietly to hear what she would say to them She said the right thing always She looked at the three tall firemen in their shining helmets standing among the smoke and cinders and dissolving snowballs and she said Would you like anything to read | K |
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| Years and years ago when I was a boy when there were wolves in Wales and birds the color of red flannel petticoats whisked past the harp shaped hills when we sang and wallowed all night and day in caves that smelt like Sunday afternoons in damp front farmhouse parlors and we chased with the jawbones of deacons the English and the bears before the motor car before the wheel before the duchess faced horse when we rode the daft and happy hills bareback it snowed and it snowed But here a small boy says It snowed last year too I made a snowman and my brother knocked it down and I knocked my brother down and then we had tea | L |
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| But that was not the same snow I say Our snow was not only shaken from white wash buckets down the sky it came shawling out of the ground and swam and drifted out of the arms and hands and bodies of the trees snow grew overnight on the roofs of the houses like a pure and grandfather moss minutely ivied the walls and settled on the postman opening the gate like a dumb numb thunder storm of white torn Christmas cards | M |
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| Were there postmen then too | N |
| With sprinkling eyes and wind cherried noses on spread frozen feet they crunched up to the doors and mittened on them manfully But all that the children could hear was a ringing of bells | O |
| You mean that the postman went rat a tat tat and the doors rang | P |
| I mean that the bells the children could hear were inside them | Q |
| I only hear thunder sometimes never bells | O |
| There were church bells too | N |
| Inside them | Q |
| No no no in the bat black snow white belfries tugged by bishops and storks And they rang their tidings over the bandaged town over the frozen foam of the powder and ice cream hills over the crackling sea It seemed that all the churches boomed for joy under my window and the weathercocks crew for Christmas on our fence | R |
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| Get back to the postmen | B |
| They were just ordinary postmen found of walking and dogs and Christmas and the snow They knocked on the doors with blue knuckles | S |
| Ours has got a black knocker | D |
| And then they stood on the white Welcome mat in the little drifted porches and huffed and puffed making ghosts with their breath and jogged from foot to foot like small boys wanting to go out | T |
| And then the presents | U |
| And then the Presents after the Christmas box And the cold postman with a rose on his button nose tingled down the tea tray slithered run of the chilly glinting hill He went in his ice bound boots like a man on fishmonger's slabs He wagged his bag like a frozen camel's hump dizzily turned the corner on one foot and by God he was gone | B |
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| Get back to the Presents | U |
| There were the Useful Presents engulfing mufflers of the old coach days and mittens made for giant sloths zebra scarfs of a substance like silky gum that could be tug o' warred down to the galoshes blinding tam o' shanters like patchwork tea cozies and bunny suited busbies and balaclavas for victims of head shrinking tribes from aunts who always wore wool next to the skin there were mustached and rasping vests that made you wonder why the aunts had any skin left at all and once I had a little crocheted nose bag from an aunt now alas no longer whinnying with us And pictureless books in which small boys though warned with quotations not to would skate on Farmer Giles' pond and did and drowned and books that told me everything about the wasp except why | V |
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| Go on the Useless Presents | U |
| Bags of moist and many colored jelly babies and a folded flag and a false nose and a tram conductor's cap and a machine that punched tickets and rang a bell never a catapult once by mistake that no one could explain a little hatchet and a celluloid duck that made when you pressed it a most unducklike sound a mewing moo that an ambitious cat might make who wished to be a cow and a painting book in which I could make the grass the trees the sea and the animals any colour I pleased and still the dazzling sky blue sheep are grazing in the red field under the rainbow billed and pea green birds Hardboileds toffee fudge and allsorts crunches cracknels humbugs glaciers marzipan and butterwelsh for the Wels | U |
Dylan Thomas
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