How exactly is 'a grief ago' deviant? What can you
infer about the meaning of the phrase from the character of the deviations?
'Grief' is an uncountable noun. It is grammatically odd to say things
like *'I had three griefs last week'. Semantically
the choice is also odd: 'grief' is not a TIME
word, but an EMOTION word.
If we compare carefully Thomas's choice to the normal paradigm, the
set of choices which are normal, we can see how the word 'grief' takes
on new meaning in this linguistic context. First of all, the semantic
oddity suggests that in this poem time is being measured in terms of
emotion. And, indeed, one of the things we could say of Thomas here
is that he has captured an abiding fact about the nature of how human
beings perceive the world. Although time ticks on with metronomic regularity,
each second being exactly equal to the preceding second, our perception
of time does vary according to how we feel. So, we often say that when
we are happy time goes fast, and that when we are sad time goes slowly.
If you want to think more about this phrase, it is also discussed on
pages 29-31 of Geoffrey Leech's A Linguistic Guide to English Poetry.
We also found a link to the BBC's
biography page for Dylan Thomas that you may find interesting.
