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Today, on November 8th, 2009, the site contains 196 poets, 8,692 poems and 7,542 comments.
Dylan Thomas - A Refusal To Mourn The Death, By Fire, Of A Child In London

Never until the mankind making
Bird beast and flower
Fathering and all humbling darkness
Tells with silence the last light breaking
And the still hour
Is come of the sea tumbling in harness

And I must enter again the round
Zion of the water bead
And the synagogue of the ear of corn
Shall I let pray the shadow of a sound
Or sow my salt seed
In the least valley of sackcloth to mourn

The majesty and burning of the child's death.
I shall not murder
The mankind of her going with a grave truth
Nor blaspheme down the stations of the breath
With any further
Elegy of innocence and youth.

Deep with the first dead lies London's daughter,
Robed in the long friends,
The grains beyond age, the dark veins of her mother,
Secret by the unmourning water
Of the riding Thames.
After the first death, there is no other.

Added: on April 7th, 2006 at 12:50 AM | Viewed: 18971 times | Comments (9)


A Refusal To Mourn The Death, By Fire, Of A Child In London - Comments and Information

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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