“A Refusal to Mourn…” Dylan Thomas. How to Deconstruct Thomas’s Poem. An Argument against Conventional Elegies.

A Refusal to Mourn the Death, by Fire, of a Child in London

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A Refusal to Mourn the Death, by Fire, of a Child in London mourns a young victim of Germany’s air raids on London during World War II. The poem consists of four 6-line stanzas, with lines 1, 3, 4,6 being longer and lines 2 and 5 being shorter, with rhyme scheme abcabc. It is an extended *paralipsis*¹, refusing to write a conventional elegy, while actually delivering an unconventional one. The language Thomas uses is as “difficult” as the thoughts he is trying to express.

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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.

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The first thirteen run-on lines, without even a *caesura* (an interruption or break within a line) are an outpouring of emotion disparaging the traditional *elegy* (lament for the dead) and the poet’s refusal to write one. Never until the life-source (mankind making) that creates (Fathering) and destroys (humbling darkness) announces (tells) with silence the extinction of light(last light breaking), the pacifying of the sea (tumbling in harness) and his own return to nature (water bead, ear of corn) in death–so, again, never– will the poet utter the smallest prayer(let pray the shadow of a sound) or shed (sow) a tear(my salt seed) into his funeral garb (sackcloth) to mourn the majesty and burning of the child’s death. These thirteen lines express his refusal with the key word, majesty. No typical elegy can find the words, no sympathetic gesture can adequately represent the profound nature (majesty) of a child’s death.

He extends his refusal with words of extravagance, intensifying his feelings: I shall not murder, grave truth, blaspheme. I shall not murder resonates as a commandment; in this case he will not desecrate (murder) the universal implications of her death (mankind of her going–note the use of going instead of passing) with some grave truth, some sanctimonious (grave, with pun on grave, burial), supposedly truthful explanation of her death. Nor revile (blaspheme) actual living breath, with any typical elegy, inadequately wording the loss of innocence and youth.

The child is now in the company (deep) of others who have died before her (first dead), adorned (robed) with these friends in death (long), with eternal nature (The grains beyond age),with the dark veins both of mother earth and her own mother, quietly (secret) enfolded by the unelegiac (unmourning) water of the Thames, ceaseless in its flowing (riding), a symbol of the universal flow of life and death, of which the child is now a part. and which no traditional elegy can express. In the somewhat oblique last line, Thomas is asserting that after the first death (Adam and Eve? the child’s own death?), which is so universal, all others, in the sense of finality, are meaningless in that all death is encompassing as a single unity.

The impact of the poem, of course, is the affecting irony that in refusing to write a conventional elegy, Thomas has anyway composed a profound, unconventional one.

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1. a rhetorical device where a speaker or writer emphasizes a topic by pretending to pass over it or omit it ↩︎

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