Thomas contrasts in the first few lines the active and the inactive. He exercises craft or art. The moon rages. He labours. But the night is still. The lovers are lying in bed in each other’s arms, and spent one might think. Even craft suggests something active while sullen art suggests the sluggishness of gloom. And the gloom seems related in quality to the lovers’ grief. Against all that though is the singing light that accompanies his labour. In the still night all is quiet and dark and lonely save for, “only,” the moon raging. I take the rage of the moon to share a quality with his art’s sullenness. And I note the contrast between that rage and singing light.
These contrasts and associations suggest to me the poet’s pleasure in his not-sullen craft—and exemplified by the very craft in this poem—juxtaposed with a kind of resistant sulkiness in his solitary work. The art results from the craft: it’s where he wants to get to. He’s in the process of creation and it’s effortful—“exercised.” Stillness contrasts with rage. I can imagine the “moon rages” to be a correlative for his intense desire to create.
The sullenness and the rage though are mediated and mitigated by the poet’s imagining the lovers in bed holding each other in their grief. It’s only after imagining them, and they are, after all, for whom he writes, that “sullen” and “rage” resolve into “labour by singing light.” That transition is suggested to by the move from the past tense “exercised” to the present tense “I labour.” “Singing light” suggests the light of the muse, since music “comes from the Greek word (mousike), which means "(art) of the Muses". This resolution springs from the poet’s deep sense of the grief that attends the lovers, their grief the deep woe conjoint with their love is the condition of their common, unsung, hard life.
The poet abjures the very things the lovers don’t have: fame ambition, wealth, prestige, accolades, honours, sophistication, awards. These don’t inspire him to create. What moves him rather is his insight into the very depths of the lovers’ innermost being, their love rooted in woe. What he earns are prosaic wages or his satisfaction at his craft and art reflecting and illuminating what is most deep in them, secret because it takes the creative imagination of an artist to reach that deep place, unlock it, bring it to light and honour it. The rhyme of art and heart couples them and in that coupling links his art to their most secret heart.
By the way, the other rhymes in the first verse similarly poetically reinforce in their coupling the poetic relation between what’s rhymed.
Paralleling and reinforcing the rejection of plaudits and material reward as the springs of his art, the poet in the second verse continues the negation of the “not for” in the first verse by listing for whom he doesn’t write, But who is that “for whom”? Is it the proud man apart from the raging moon; or does apart complete the identification of one class of person not written for? If the latter, then the poet, it seems, now invokes the raging moon as objectifying the throes of creation.
I’m inclined to this latter view for a few reasons.
It’s hard to understand what might be meant by the proud man apart from the raging moon.
A proud man apart describes completely a certain kind of man, aloof in pridefulness, separated from others by his pride, his pride an obstruction to connection, the means of his self imposed isolation.
A proud man apart contrasts precisely with the lovers abed.
Thomas in the first verse has set “moon rages” as integral to his craft and art both as physical setting and as correlative of the intense desire to create.
And there is a nice link in imagery between the raging moon and the spindrift pages: spindrift is the spray coming off cresting waves; and one meaning of a raging moon is its effect on oceans by affecting and effecting tides; so the throes of creation is imaged in the pages flying around as the poet writes, as though they they’re the white tips of spray of cresting waves.
Nor does the poet write to commemorate the famous “towering” dead. When it comes to the “towering dead” he’s like Huck Finn:
“After supper she got out her book and learned me about Moses and the Bulrushers, and I was in a sweat to find out all about him; but by and by she let it out that Moses had been dead a considerable long time; so then I didn't care no more about him, because I don't take no stock in dead people.”
The poet’s abjured dead already have “their nightingales and psalms.”
So the proud man apart and the towering dead with all their ceremonial memorialization define further by contrast for whom the poet creates.
In the last four lines the poet’s words are, again, devoted to those he considers “lovers.” Who might count as lovers isn’t made precisely clear but “lovers” of course goes to those who have the capacity to love. They, it seems, take into themselves the accumulated grief of the ages. While their arms stretch around one another, they will also spread out to encompass the history of the world’s grief. They do that because their conjoint lives of love and woe are the universal thus permanent condition of such common, undistinguished, loving but woe-filled people.
Finally, the poet says he does not write for those who “praise” him or pay his “wages.” He seems not to want to write for anyone to whom he feels materially or conventionally beholden. He knows that those for whom he writes do not “heed” or pay great attention to his “craft or art.” Their woe infused lives exist outside his art.
I don’t read this as sad as such. Rather, I see this final recognition as an acknowledgement of satisfaction if his non sullen art can convey the deepest truths about those for whom he writes, who inspire him to write, who by their existence resolve his art, which was initially sullen. His art will honour, commemorate and memorialize them.
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