Back to Poem Line 5 The speaker shares the same fate as the flower. In wintry fever, Thomas includes still another paradox as the cold of winter is blended with a fever's heat. The pattern in this stanza is the same as the first, both grammatically and in the organization of ideas. However, the focus now changes from relationship between man and the biological world to man and the geological world. The force that was introduced in the first stanza pushes the water from under the earth's surface through the rocks to give birth to the mountain stream.
Blood is pushed through man's veins just as the water coursed through the rocks.
The contrasting element following the caesura describes these same streams dying. The alliterative half-rhyme of drives and dries reinforces this contrast. Thomas is noted for his ability to combine words to create arresting images, such as mouthing streams, which are open to a variety of interpretations. A stream's mouth is the place where it enters another body of water. The word mouth will appear in two different contexts later in the stanza.