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Poet: Dylan Thomas
Poem: A Refusal To Mourn The Death, By Fire, Of A Child In London
Comment 8 of 8, added on August 4th, 2006 at 12:26 PM.
This poem has haunted me for many years. On reading the last line, it seemed entirely clear what Dylan Thomas was saying - that there is a depth of grief that one can go to only once. Upon coming to grips with the horror of it, one can no longer be so craven as to assume the ability to truly grasp the totality of death or to even presume the ability to go there again and again without losing one's self in it.
The third stanza states:
I shall not murder
The mankind of her going with a grave truth
Nor blapheme down the stations of the breath
With any further
Elegy of innocence and youth
That is, to truly and fully feel the horror of that particular death, after so many others - whether personal or representative of humanity's destructiveness - would both be futile and lead us to our own destruction.
In the end, wasn't it Dylan Thomas's own inability to deal with death that killed him?
SpiderWoman from United Kingdom
Comment 7 of 8, added on April 7th, 2006 at 12:50 AM.
This is an interesting poetic view of grief and the afterlife, true. But has anyone here thought about the physical/historical reference? Dylan Thomas did a great deal of his writing in the wreckage and waste of the Battle of Britan. The dead person literaly spoken to is "London's Daughter" and the reference bears investigation
Andrew from United States
Comment 6 of 8, added on March 17th, 2006 at 6:35 PM.
This is one of my favorite poems of those I have read by Thomas or by others. Its delight in metaphor, in condensing multiple thoughts i.e, in the least valley of sackcloth" conjuring up the psalmist's valley of the dead, sackcloth and ashes of grief, etc. and this goes on all through this wonderfully imagistic poem. But the technical prowess never supplants a sense of his deep feeling for this now, through his "refusal to mourn" monumental loss. For the child who he ironically refuses to mourn is not merely mourned but apostrophized as being "robed in the long friends, the dark veins of her mother, secret by the unmourning waters of the riding Thames" - she is not only monumental, but beyond mourning not because of petulance but because of her transcendece and apotheosis. "After the first death there is no other" conceit goes beyond the afterlife - it simply suspends the question with the positive thought that not so much after life that ends in death, but after the death that is uintrinsic to life - there will not be another, a loss, which unlike life, we need not mourn for. A magnificent poem that is most of all a pleasure to read and to listen to merely in terms of its conceits and its language.
Frank De Canio from United States
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This poem has haunted me for many years. On reading the last line, it seemed entirely clear what Dylan Thomas was saying - that there is a depth of grief that one can go to only once. Upon coming to grips with the horror of it, one can no longer be so craven as to assume the ability to truly grasp the totality of death or to even presume the ability to go there again and again without losing one's self in it.
The third stanza states:
I shall not murder
The mankind of her going with a grave truth
Nor blapheme down the stations of the breath
With any further
Elegy of innocence and youth
That is, to truly and fully feel the horror of that particular death, after so many others - whether personal or representative of humanity's destructiveness - would both be futile and lead us to our own destruction.
In the end, wasn't it Dylan Thomas's own inability to deal with death that killed him?
SpiderWoman from United Kingdom