Tuesday, January 27, 2015
Dylan Thomas "A Refusal to Mourn the Death, by Fire, of a Child in London
I found the third and fourth stanza to be the most imaginative and interesting. The way Thomas discusses the atrocity of a dead child with the lines "The mankind of her going with a grave truth" and "Deep with the first dead lies London's daughter, / Robed in the long friends, / The grains beyond the age, the dark veins of her mother" and ending the poem with "After the first death, there is no other". The images in these stanzas tie the poem to the titles "Refusal to Mourn" because the imagery throughout alludes the reader to the "innocence and youth" of a child's life and how they cannot be mourned because they were taken away, and it is to difficult to truly come to accept. The last line especially says a lot to this rhetoric, that once the death of a child happened out of war, it is "the first death", and the human race is left tainted and "no other" death matters.
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Agree on the statements in no. 3 and 4 stanzas respectively. I think Dylan's point is to remind himself through the tragedy of the London bombings of the resilience of life, hence the references to matter in its natural forms (water drop, grain, etc), that it emerges out of the ashes of those who burned. A lot of hope contained in those lines!
ReplyDeletePrimary in the voice of the speaker of the poem is to overcome the urge to grieve in ignorance of deeper aspects of human death. For Dylan to give himself up to nothing but grief signifies his refusal to realize a scientific fact of nature, viz., that matter cannot be destroyed, merely reallocated and reshaped. Grief by its nature causes the griever to feel that something/someone has been lost completely; Dylan declares in the poem that this is not true.
My concern over this bold notion is that it can seem to trivialize and underestimate the tragedy of so many dying horrible deaths. In this sense, trite universal facts of matter take precedence over "elegies of innocence and youth."