The Full Text of “The Hand That Signed the Paper”
The Full Text of “The Hand That Signed the Paper”
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“The Hand That Signed the Paper” Introduction
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"The Hand That Signed the Paper" appears in Dylan Thomas's second collection, Twenty-Five Poems (1936). A meditation on political power and violence, the poem focuses on the document-signing "hand" of a very powerful leader. The leader has signed some "treaty" that has shaken the world: it has caused the destruction of a city, the division of a country, the downfall of at least one ruler, and the deaths of countless people. The speaker explores the grim irony in the fact that a simple hand, attached to a vulnerable human body, could wield such godlike power and wreak so much destruction. The poem also comments on the way powerful leaders emotionally detach themselves from the consequences of their policies.
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“The Hand That Signed the Paper” Summary
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By signing a document, the leader's hand caused the destruction of a city. Its five powerful fingers harmed other people, as if imposing a tax on their breath; doubled the number of corpses in the world; caused the division of a nation; and caused the murder of a king, as if the five fingers were kings themselves.
The leader's powerful hand is connected to a weak-looking shoulder. Its knuckles are chalk-stained and cramped. Its quill pen (which it used to sign the document) has stopped an outbreak of violence, which, in turn, had stopped diplomatic negotiations.
By signing the treaty, the leader's hand caused disease, famine, and infestation in the part of the world affected. It must be an amazing hand, to impose its will on all of humankind just by scrawling a signature.
The five fingers of the leader's hand count up the corpses, but they don't soothe the wounded or touch the dead. The leader's hand overrules the leader's own compassion as sternly as the hand of God rules over heaven. Hands (unlike the people they're attached to) cannot cry.
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“The Hand That Signed the Paper” Themes
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Power and Political Crisis
"The Hand That Signed the Paper" muses on the disproportionate power some political leaders hold over the rest of humanity. Using the leader's "hand" to stand in for the leader, or for political power itself, the speaker remarks that the signing of a single treaty has reshaped the world. It has destroyed a "city," divided a "country," toppled a "king," and caused the deaths of countless ordinary people. The hand wields godlike power, yet it belongs to an ordinary, vulnerable person, and the result is monstrous and wanton destruction. The poem implies, then, that it's unnatural and catastrophic for one person to hold so much sway over so many other lives.
The poem portrays "the hand" (and, by extension, the leader it belongs to) as a godlike ruler over ordinary people. Though the speaker leaves the exact historical scenario to the imagination, it's clear that the leader signed a "treaty" before or after a war. Rather than sustaining or restoring peace, however, this treaty caused mass violence: directly or indirectly, it wrecked "a city," split "a country" in half, "did a king to death" (brought down another powerful leader), and "Doubled the globe of dead" (killed millions). In fact, the signature wreaked a biblical level of destruction: it caused "fever," "famine," and "locusts," similar to the plagues God visits on Egypt in the Old Testament. Ultimately, the speaker compares this human hand to the hand of God "rul[ing]" over "heaven," implying that the leader holds as much sway over earthly events as God holds over the divine realm.
The speaker also acknowledges the human frailty of the leader whose "hand" this is. For example, the speaker notes that this "mighty hand leads to a sloping shoulder." The ruler is politically powerful but not physically powerful (broad-shouldered and strong). Even the "finger joints" of this hand are humbly human, "cramped with chalk." The hand belongs to a mere mortal, so there's the suggestion that, in wielding godlike power, the leader is out of their depth. They might be morally as well as physically weak, and that weakness might make their political strength all the more disastrous. In this context, the speaker's claim that the "scribbl[ing]" hand is "Great" sounds more like sarcasm than praise.
Indeed, the hand's (or leader's) impact seems overwhelmingly destructive, suggesting that this kind of concentrated power devastates humanity as a whole. The signing of the treaty does "put an end to murder," at least temporarily; it seems to set the terms that end a war. But the signature is ruinous in the long run: it ultimately "Double[s]" the number of "dead" bodies. By the end of the poem, it's clear that the "hand" of a single leader has no business "hold[ing] dominion over / Man." Even the fact that the leader's signature is a rushed or childlike "scribble[]" highlights the absurd limits of their capabilities. The power they hold over others far exceeds their ability to wield it with care. They can't control their long-term impact—and can't or won't clean up their messes, either. For example, they can "count the dead" after setting a terrible policy, but they can't or won't mourn all the dead or soothe all the "wound[ed]." Rather than treating this "king[ly]" power with awe or admiration, the poem regards it with horror and disgust.
Where this theme appears in the poem:- Lines 1-16
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Callousness vs. Compassion
"The Hand That Signed the Paper" portrays the leader's mighty "hand" (a synecdoche for the leader themselves, or power itself) as totally insensitive to the people it harms. The hand carelessly destroys cities, countries, and lives and extends no compassion to the victims afterward. By figuratively detaching the hand from the rest of the ruler, the poem suggests that the exercise of political power—at least on a large scale—is inherently detached and callous. Rather than reaching out to help individuals, a ruler of mass populations "rules" their own "pity" in the sense of stifling it. Indirectly, then, the poem pleads for a more democratic and compassionate politics.
The poem's narrow focus on "the hand" makes the act of wielding power seem detached, heartless, and inhuman. The poem never describes the leader's face, for example, so the reader never learns anything about their age, gender, personality, or identity in general. It's as though, in their capacity as a leader, they can't or won't function as an individual human. They operate as the detached, impersonal "hand" of the state itself—and that detachment enables cruelty. When the operations of the state are cut off from individual thoughts and feelings, the poem implies, policies become callous and destructive.
By describing this nightmare situation, the poem implicitly argues for a politics that is in touch with human emotions. When a hand (leader) is as powerful as "five kings," according to the speaker, the leader may assess their destruction ("count the dead") but will not properly mourn or mitigate it. The leader's hand will not "soften / The crusted wound" of the injured or "pat the brow" of the dead. A leader this powerful loses all touch with the people. Moreover, a leader this powerful loses all touch with their own personality. They will "rule," or subdue, their "pity" as strictly as a god "rules" over "heaven." The poem's final statement, "Hands have no tears to flow," drives the point home: a leader who acts as the mechanical arm of a vast, impersonal state cuts themselves off entirely from natural emotions. The result is mass death and political crisis.
The poem implies that a healthier politics—a fairer distribution of power—would allow for mourning and compassion. Metaphorically speaking, it would reunite the hand and the heart.
Where this theme appears in the poem:- Lines 13-16
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Line-by-Line Explanation & Analysis of “The Hand That Signed the Paper”
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Lines 1-4
The hand that ...
... king to death.The poem begins by describing a series of violent political crises, all of which, according to the speaker, trace back to a single event. Someone's "hand," by the act of "sign[ing]" a single "paper," has caused a domino-like series of catastrophes. The speaker describes this process in compressed, indirect, metaphorical language:
The hand that signed the paper felled a city;
Five sovereign fingers taxed the breath,
Doubled the globe of dead and halved a country;Since the hand and its fingers are "sovereign" (self-ruling, like a monarch or autonomous country), the "paper" would seem to be an official document signed by a world leader. Later lines will reveal that the paper is, in fact, a diplomatic "treaty"—one designed to end a war or other "murder[ous]" conflict. But from the start, it's obvious that the treaty's impact has been anything but peaceful. It has started a political ripple effect that destroyed a city ("felled" it like a tree), ripped an entire "country" in "hal[f]" (forcibly split it into two separate nations), and apparently, killed millions of people. The treaty—or, rather, the leader who signed it—has "Doubled the globe of dead," or doubled the number of corpses in the world. The leader has metaphorically "taxed the breath" of these victims, as if confiscating their very lives through some cold bureaucratic process.
Even if the speaker is being hyperbolic, it's clear that they're accusing this leader of something like genocide. Whatever the leader intended to achieve by signing the paper, they have actually caused mass death. They've also caused the death of a fellow world leader, who is either a literal or metaphorical "king." As the speaker dryly puts it: "These five kings did a king to death." In other words, the treaty-signing leader wielded more power in each finger of their hand than the leader who got assassinated!
Notice that the "hand"/"fingers" here function as a synecdoche for the leader as a whole, who is never identified or described in detail. The "hand" seems almost detached from the rest of the leader, as though it were a mere extension of the government (or of the long arm of the law). Over the course of the poem, the "hand" becomes a symbol for political power itself.
If the historical references here seem vague, that's because they are. Thomas doesn't tie the poem to a particular treaty, leader, country, or era. This ambiguity makes the poem's political commentary more universally applicable. Thomas was writing during a period (the 1930s) that was rife with dictators, wars, and controversial treaties, so he might be alluding to events in his own time—or he might not. After all, every age of human history has seen leaders who claim more than their share of power and cause vast suffering as a result.
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Lines 5-8
The mighty hand ...
... end to talk. -
Lines 9-12
The hand that ...
... a scribbled name. -
Lines 13-16
The five kings ...
... tears to flow.
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“The Hand That Signed the Paper” Symbols
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The Hand
Primarily, "the hand" in the poem is a synecdoche for the leader whose hand it is—and, by extension, for the office that leader holds. But the hand also has some symbolic meaning as well. Hands are traditionally associated with action, control, the implementation of one's will, and sometimes with manipulation (a word that literally means to control with the hands). In religious contexts, the hand is often symbolically associated with divine power and will. The "hand of God" is sometimes said to sway events in heaven and earth, as in line 15 ("as a hand rules heaven").
All of these associations figure in the poem. The speaker describes a powerful—almost god-like—political leader whose "hand" imposes their will on the rest of the world. The "hand" operates in an official capacity and impersonal manner, as though it were a mere extension of the body politic, or the long arm of the law. (These familiar idioms show how common this type of symbolism is in political contexts!) As a result, the hand seems distant from the leader's individual personality and human emotions; in fact, it "rules," or subdues, those emotions, as if physically restraining them.
Hands sometimes carry more positive symbolism: because they can reach out, touch others, etc., they're often associated with intimacy and human connection. But the poem makes clear that the symbolic hand of power rejects all that. It will not soothe or "pat" the wounded, for example. It's interested only in asserting the leader's will (by "sign[ing]" documents), coldly "count[ing]," and so on.
Where this symbol appears in the poem:- Lines 1-2
- Line 4
- Lines 5-6
- Line 9
- Lines 11-12
- Lines 13-16
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“The Hand That Signed the Paper” Poetic Devices & Figurative Language
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Metaphor
The poem uses a number of metaphors to illustrate the leader's power—which is primarily a destructive power.
For example, the speaker repeatedly compares the leader's "hand" or individual "fingers" to powerful rulers in their own right. Line 2 refers to the leader's "five sovereign fingers," later rephrased as "five kings" (lines 4 and 13). The speaker claims that these five miniature "kings," through the act of signing a treaty, caused the death of a real-life ruler (perhaps a literal "king"). The metaphor "These five kings did a king to death" suggests, then, that the treaty-signing leader holds more power in just one finger than the sovereign leader of another nation.
The leader's "mighty," king-like hand is also said to have "taxed the breath" and "Doubled the globe of dead." These metaphors also stress the leader's deadly power, which took away (figuratively, "taxed") the breath of life from many people—so many that the total number of corpses in the world "Doubled." ("The globe of dead" might refer more specifically to some underworld or afterlife, whose population the leader's policy has doubled. Regardless, the meaning is the same: even accounting for hyperbole, the leader has caused genocidal levels of death.)
Finally, line 15 (a simile rather than a metaphor) draws a pointed, ironic comparison:
A hand rules pity as a hand rules heaven;
In context, this means that the leader subdues their compassion (i.e., for their victims) as strictly as the hand of God rules over heaven. Yet the leader's emotional repression has clearly resulted in the opposite of "heaven": it's created a hell on earth.
Where metaphor appears in the poem:- Line 2: “Five sovereign fingers taxed the breath,”
- Line 3: “Doubled the globe of dead”
- Line 4: “These five kings”
- Line 13: “The five kings”
- Line 15: “A hand rules pity as a hand rules heaven;”
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Repetition
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Irony
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Synecdoche
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End-Stopped Line
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"The Hand That Signed the Paper" Vocabulary
Select any word below to get its definition in the context of the poem. The words are listed in the order in which they appear in the poem.
- Felled
- Sovereign
- Taxed
- The globe of dead
- Five kings
- Goose's quill
- Locusts
- Dominion
- Crusted
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(Location in poem: Line 1: “The hand that signed the paper felled a city;”)
Brought down; destroyed.
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Form, Meter, & Rhyme Scheme of “The Hand That Signed the Paper”
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Form
The poem contains four quatrains (four-line stanzas). Each of these quatrains rhymes ABAB, though some of the rhymes are imperfect (e.g., "city"/'country").
The meter shifts around in an unusual way:
- The first and third lines of each quatrain are written in iambic pentameter: that is, they generally follow a five-beat, unstressed-stressed (da-DUM, da-DUM) rhythm.
- The second line of each quatrain is iambic tetrameter: four beats, same rhythm.
- The fourth line of each quatrain is iambic trimeter—three beats, same rhythm—with the exception of line 4, which is more like tetrameter.
There's no traditional name for this form. However, poetic ballads also have rhymed quatrains with alternating longer and shorter lines, so even though this isn't a standard ballad, it has a similar song-like quality. Like most of Thomas's poetry, it's highly musical without rigidly following a prescribed structure. (Thomas was part of the experimental modernist generation, so he generally worked with his own idiosyncratic sounds and rhythms—though he was also very deft with traditional forms, such as villanelles.) The clipped fourth line of each stanza brings the reader up short, adding extra bite and emphasis to phrases like "murder / That put an end to talk" and "Hands have no tears to flow."
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Meter
The poem is metrical, but the meter varies within each stanza:
- The first and third lines of each quatrain use iambic pentameter: they contain ten (or sometimes eleven) syllables, five of which are stressed, and generally follow an unstressed-stressed (da-DUM, da-DUM) rhythm.
- The second line of each quatrain is written in iambic tetrameter: the same rhythm, but with only eight syllables and four stresses.
- The fourth line of each quatrain is iambic trimeter: the same rhythm, but with six syllables and three stresses. (The exception here is line 4 of the first quatrain, which contains eight syllables and five stresses: "These five kings did a king to death.")
Here's how this pattern looks in lines 5-8:
The migh- | ty hand | leads to | a slo- | ping shoulder,
The fin- | ger joints | are cramped | with chalk;
A goose- | 's quill | has put | an end | to murder
That put | an end | to talk.As in any metrical poem, the rhythm occasionally varies—otherwise it would sound too boringly predictable! There's one such variation in the first line above: "leads to" is a trochaic foot (stressed-unstressed) rather than an iambic foot (unstressed-stressed).
Overall, the meter adds a lively, song-like quality to a rather somber poem. Its shifting rhythms keep the reader slightly off balance, perhaps reflecting the unsettled, violent world the poem describes.
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Rhyme Scheme
The poem's quatrains are rhymed ABAB, CDCD, and so on. Some rhymes are perfect (e.g., "breath"/"death") and others imperfect (e.g., "city"/"country").
This rhyme scheme adds to the poem's musical, ballad-like quality. Along with the variable meter, the mix of perfect and imperfect rhymes makes the form somewhat rough and unpredictable—perhaps mirroring the political upheavals the poem describes.
Rhyme also adds punch and emphasis to each stanza's final line, which is usually shorter than the other lines and always end-stopped with a period. In that way, rhyme drives home the poem's grim political points, lending a sense of biting finality to phrases like "did a king to death" and "put an end to talk."
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“The Hand That Signed the Paper” Speaker
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The poem has an unnamed third-person speaker, who describes—and subtly comments on—the impact of the "hand" and its signature.
Although the speaker relates events in an impersonal way, some of their personality shows through. For example, they note with quiet irony that "The mighty hand leads to a sloping shoulder": that is, the leader's political power doesn't translate to physical power. (The leader has an average physique, not a strong and broad-shouldered one.) Later, the speaker's claim about the leader's "Great[ness]" sounds sarcastic in context:
The hand that signed the treaty bred a fever,
And famine grew, and locusts came;
Great is the hand that holds dominion over
Man by a scribbled name.The leader's policies have caused disease, famine, and a plague of locusts, so how "Great" could their leadership possibly be? The speaker's verbal irony helps puncture their mystique.
The speaker's criticism of the leader (and of the ruthless exercise of power) becomes more explicit in the last stanza. By noting that the leader signed off on a destructive policy, yet wouldn't comfort the victims of that policy, the speaker makes the leader sound cruel and aloof.
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“The Hand That Signed the Paper” Setting
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The poem's setting could be described as the theater of global politics in general. Though the speaker mentions "a city" and "a country" (lines 1 and 3), the events they describe aren't closely tied to a particular nation, region, or period. They include details common to every era of geopolitics, such as "treat[ies]" and "famine[s]" (lines 9-10).
It's true that, in the modern era, literal "king[s]" are somewhat rare and assassinations of kings even rarer (see line 4: "These five kings did a king to death."). The "goose's quill" pen (line 7) also seems like a detail from an older era. However, antique pens are occasionally used in modern document-signing ceremonies, and "king" might be read as a metaphor for a powerful ruler in general. Indeed, most world leaders still formally enact policies by hand-signing official documents.
In other words, though Thomas was writing in the 1930s (well after the heyday of quill pens!), he could still be gesturing toward what were, for him, modern events. And the kinds of events the poem describes—wars, epidemics, the destruction of cities, etc.—still take place today, often as a result of leaders' policy choices. So by keeping his references (including setting references) fairly generic, Thomas makes the poem's commentary more universal.
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Literary and Historical Context of “The Hand That Signed the Paper”
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Literary Context
The Welsh poet Dylan Thomas (1914-1953) was part of the second generation of modernists. This group of 20th-century writers (which included figures like T. S. Eliot and William Carlos Williams) sought new modes of poetic expression, abandoning or reworking the conventions of 19th-century verse to write daring, expansive, psychologically acute poetry in a wide range of experimental forms.
Thomas was something of a prodigy. He published many of his intense, idiosyncratic poems when he was just a teenager. While his stylistic inventiveness places him among the modernists, his pantheistic feelings about nature and his passionate sincerity also mark him as a descendant of 19th-century Romantic poets like William Blake and John Keats (both of whom he read enthusiastically). He also admired his contemporaries W. B. Yeats and W. H. Auden, who, like him, often wrote of the "mystery" behind everyday life (though in very different ways).
Thomas wrote "The Hand That Signed the Paper" in 1934, published it in New Verse magazine in 1935, and collected it in his second book, Twenty-Five Poems, in 1936. This collection, released the year Thomas turned 22, also contains the well-known poem "And Death Shall Have No Dominion" and the experimental sonnet sequence "Altarwise by Owl-Light."
Historical Context
Dylan Thomas wrote and published "The Hand That Signed the Paper" during the 1930s, a decade plagued by the global economic downturn called the Great Depression. The decade began 12 years after the end of World War I (1914-1918) and ended with the outbreak of World War II (1939-1945). It also saw a number of violent conflicts in the run-up to WWII, including the Second Sino-Japanese War and the Spanish Civil War.
So while the poem doesn't make clear which "treaty" it's about—or whether it's tied to a particular historical scenario—Thomas's era had no shortage of wars and disasters to comment on. It also featured some controversial treaties, including the 1919 Treaty of Versailles. This was the post-WWI agreement that dictated Germany's punishment for its role in that conflict. Some observers at the time argued that the treaty was too punitive, and thereby created the conditions under which a dangerous leader like Hitler could rise.
Whether or not the poem comments on specific real-life tragedies, it certainly reflects an era full of mass death events, including war (organized mass "murder"), "fever" (e.g., the flu pandemic of 1918-1920), and "famine" (e.g., the Soviet famine of 1930-1933). As a period notoriously rife with dictators, the years between the world wars gave ample cause to worry about concentrating too much power in too few "Hands."
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More “The Hand That Signed the Paper” Resources
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External Resources
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"Twenty-Five Poems" — More information about the collection in which the poem first appeared.
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The Poet's Life — A biography of Dylan Thomas from the Poetry Foundation.
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The Poem Aloud — Listen to actor Richard Burton read "The Hand That Signed the Paper."
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A Dylan Thomas Documentary — Watch a film about Thomas's life and work.
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Dylan Thomas in Conversation — Thomas discusses poetry and film in a 1953 symposium with other writers.
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LitCharts on Other Poems by Dylan Thomas
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