The Force That through the Green Fuse Drives the Flower Time Quotes

Thomas introduces us to "the force" in the poem's very first line. He really wants us to take some… well, time to ponder this "force." By the time we read the poem's first few lines, we get a sense of this force's dual nature. It's fueling the blooming flower, but there is something ominous about it as well. Those words "fuse" and "blast" create a good deal of this tension. Anyone who has ever seen a Road Runner cartoon knows that this is a combination that never has a happy ending (at least for the coyote). 

And it turns out that our suspicions were right. The speaker calls the force "my destroyer." Sounds bad, right? It doesn't get better. "The force," in addition to being a "destroyer," is also a "wintry fever" that "ben[ds]," destroys, the speaker's youth. 

In these first few lines we get a sense of a force that has the power to fuel life and to destroy it. Not too many forces fit that bill. So, we start considering time. "The force," the "destroyer," and the "wintry fever" all work as time metaphors.

Time's dual nature (creator-destroyer) is alive and well in stanza 2. The stanza begins with that force metaphor again. This time, the force is powering the moving waters of a river "through the rocks." Seems nice, right? Water is, after all, essential for life. The force is also powering the blood through the speaker's veins—also good. But things take a turn at the end of line 7. The same force is also drying the streams. Dried-up streams don't sound good. On a literal level, the stream is destroyed. On a figurative level, if water equals life, the dried-up stream represents death. Thomas drives this association home in the very next line when the speaker's blood "turns […] to wax." No big mystery here. If your blood is dried up, you're dead.

The stanza ends with another time metaphor, "at the mountain spring the same mouth sucks." This greedy "mouth" (time) is sucking up the mountain spring. It sounds like the spring is destined for the same end as the river: all dried up.

Stanza 3 begins with yet another time metaphor, "the hand." Thomas throws in some personification to make time's mysterious nature a little more relatable (remember, we said a little).

Giving "the force" the human feature of a hand gives the reader something to, well, hold on to (sorry). But it's true. We are familiar with phrases like "the hands of time" or even "the hand of God." Things like figurative language and organized religion can help us feel more at ease with the mysteries of the unknown. Both can, in a sense, give body to things we can't see or touch, like time.

In stanza 3, we get yet another dose of time's duality. The hand (time) is moving water, a positive element, as well as the quicksand, which is definitely negative. Here again, time is just as much at home in creative or destructive waters.