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Poet: Dylan Thomas
Poem: A Refusal To Mourn The Death, By Fire, Of A Child In London
Comment 9 of 9, added on January 13th, 2009 at 7:56 PM.
I teach High School literature and we took this poem apart as part of a unit on Modern Poetry.
Thomas has a theology, expressed in this work, which is cyclical in nature. When we die, we return to nature as our component atoms. "enter again the round Zion of the water bead and the synagogue of the ear of corn." We are born from darkness "Mankind making / bird beast and flower / fathering and all humbling darkness"; when we die we return to the darkness of the earth.
I see this as a cycle: when we die we become atoms which then form other bodies. IF one views this as cyclical, THEN the death of the first person completes the cycle. Everyone dying thereafter is part of the past dead and becomes part of the future living.
Kiehl Rathbun from United States
Comment 8 of 9, 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 9, 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 But has anyone here thought about the physical/historical reference?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
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I teach High School literature and we took this poem apart as part of a unit on Modern Poetry.
Thomas has a theology, expressed in this work, which is cyclical in nature. When we die, we return to nature as our component atoms. "enter again the round Zion of the water bead and the synagogue of the ear of corn." We are born from darkness "Mankind making / bird beast and flower / fathering and all humbling darkness"; when we die we return to the darkness of the earth.
I see this as a cycle: when we die we become atoms which then form other bodies. IF one views this as cyclical, THEN the death of the first person completes the cycle. Everyone dying thereafter is part of the past dead and becomes part of the future living.
Kiehl Rathbun from United States