"[1] Written in 1933 (when Thomas was nineteen), it was first published in the Sunday Referee and then the following year in his 1934 collection 18 Poems.
W. Christie writes of the poem in Dylan Thomas: A Literary Life,"...we should be careful not to allow the 'self-hypnotic incantation' to mask a characteristic irony and subtle self-qualification.
The poem in fact explores, instead of asserting, the pantheistic union of man and nature through a quintessential life-and-death force.
For all the poet shares with 'the crooked rose', either as destroyer or victim, he cannot make himself heard ('I am dumb to tell' is repeated five times as a refrain), a failure that unwittingly distinguishes a language-using animal like man from an inanimate, inarticulate nature.
"[2]The poem was the inspiration for a series of paintings by Ceri Richards made between 1943 and 1945.