Poem of the Week

This week's poem:

And Death Shall Have No Dominion
by Dylan Thomas

And death shall have no dominion.
Dead men naked they shall be one
With the man in the wind and the west moon;
When their bones are picked clean and the clean bones gone,
They shall have stars at elbow and foot;
Though they go mad they shall be sane,
Though they sink through the sea they shall rise again;
Though lovers be lost love shall not;
And death shall have no dominion.

And death shall have no dominion.
Under the windings of the sea
They lying long shall not die windily;
Twisting on racks when sinews give way,
Strapped to a wheel, yet they shall not break;
Faith in their hands shall snap in two,
And the unicorn evils run them through;
Split all ends up they shan't crack;
And death shall have no dominion.

And death shall have no dominion.
No more may gulls cry at their ears
Or waves break loud on the seashores;
Where blew a flower may a flower no more
Lift its head to the blows of the rain;
Though they be mad and dead as nails,
Heads of the characters hammer through daisies;
Break in the sun till the sun breaks down,
And death shall have no dominion.
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I like this poem for its 'rebellious' nature. It says that even though death's final, there's still hope left, as the line "And death shall have no dominion" suggests.

I was wondering whom is the poem about. My first impression is that it is about sailors of a wrecked ship, there's a lot of references to sailing. Does anybody else have different idea(s)?

My first reaction to this poem is how the repetition of "And death shall have no dominion" makes the poem song-like. To state the obvious, it opens and closes each stanza, like a refrain, so that we hear the actual line six times out of the 27 total lines. If it were read aloud, like Thomas was famous for, there would be no doubt as to what the audience would come away with. No only is it song-like, it is hymn-like; the line feels like a church refrain.

No one can do death and repetition like Dylan Thomas! What amazes me about this poem is that the repetition does not feel repetitive, as it so easily could, but powerful instead. I'll post more when I've had more than five hours sleep in a 48 hour period. :yawnb:

For me this poem goes on two stanzas too long. I can see the contrast created in the first stanza with the phrases 'death having no dominion' and 'we shall'. It's not necessary to repeat lines here unless he's trying to create some bigger effect, which seems to be absent in my initial reading. What he conveys is pretty straightforward: that death shall have no dominion over dead(physically) men. But this statement seems to stagnate as the image is created in stanza 1, and is reiterated.

I'm going to have to disagree with ktd. I think the thing that makes the sound of this poem powerful is the repetition, and I think the stanzas each speak to a different purpose. One stanza alone wouldn't have any kind of punch to it. I wouldn't think of this as a memorable poem from just one stanza. I think part of the reason for the repetion is that he wants to create the feeling of something or someone constantly beating against the one eternal constant, death.

In case anyone's interested, the line "And death shall have no dominion" is paraphrased from Romans 6:9, "Knowing that Christ being raised from the dead dieth no more; death hath no more dominion over him." (KJV) I'll get to the content of the stanzas a little later but, apropos of powerful repetition, Beethoven's 5th just came on the radio, and that's one of those you have to take time out for :nod: ...ciao.

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Originally Posted by Petrarch's Love

I'm going to have to disagree with ktd. I think the thing that makes the sound of this poem powerful is the repetition, and I think the stanzas each speak to a different purpose. One stanza alone wouldn't have any kind of punch to it. I wouldn't think of this as a memorable poem from just one stanza. I think part of the reason for the repetion is that he wants to create the feeling of something or someone constantly beating against the one eternal constant, death.

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I'll be curious to see how you distiguish the stanzas. My first response is to agree with ktd. The poem is very static; all three stanzas seem like support of the repeated line, and that's not a bad thing except as I explored the contents of the stanzas, they looked pretty superficial, if not meaningless. I was going to wait to say this until I fully absorbed the poem, but your post prompted me.

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In case anyone's interested, the line "And death shall have no dominion" is paraphrased from Romans 6:9, "Knowing that Christ being raised from the dead dieth no more; death hath no more dominion over him." (KJV) I'll get to the content of the stanzas a little later but, apropos of powerful repetition, Beethoven's 5th just came on the radio, and that's one of those you have to take time out for :nod: ...ciao

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Thanks for the source of the allusion. It helps. And yes beethoven's 5th is worth stopping for.

To start I'll say two things. One is that I think this is a fairly early poem for Dylan Thomas (someone can correct me if I'm wrong about this). It anticipates in very interesting ways the later "Do Not Go Gente into That Good Night," but is less developed in terms of both form and content than later poems such as that one. The second thing is that I still sense there are some lines and allusions that either I'm not getting, or Thomas isn't making very clear. For both these reasons I can understand why both of you are finding the poem somewhat "static."

That said, however, I think there's a lot more going on in this poem than first meets the eye. I divided the stanzas roughly into the categories of descriptions of heaven, hell, and earth in relation to death.

1. Stanza one is concerned with those who, "though they sink through the sea they shall rise again." All mankind becoming one in a sort of universal love, and what has been broken repaired. The first

2. The second stanza focuses on those who remain "under the windings of the sea" (in contrast to those who rose from the sea in the first stanza). They "shall not die windily" in the way of those in the first stanza, who "shall be one/ With the man in the wind," and they suffer unending torments which will never cease, without promise of either death or salvation. Their punishments are reminiscent either of the inquisition or of the sufferings of Christian martyrs, but this time without the promise of death and reward. Their bodies, endure torture without even the hope of being broken. One assumes that those described in this stanza find it agony that "death shall have no dominion."

3. The third stanza, is I think the hardest. It seems to describe the earth itself in the face of an apocalyptic end of all days. The first five or so lines describe the things of the earth--the sea, the flower the rain--which will be no more. In the final lines, I'm still not too certain about his choice of the word "characters" I don't know if he is alluding to something or has certain characters in mind or if he is referring generally to all people as characters in the play of life. In any case, I find a wonderful lot going on in these lines:

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Heads of the characters hammer through daisies;
Break in the sun till the sun breaks down.

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These lines seem to bridge the gap between the way death works in the world today and the way it will work come the end of days. Now the decomposed bodies of the dead "hammer through" the earth to life again in the form of daisies, which "break in the sun" both in the sense of breaking open and in terms of breaking down again in death themselves. This can also transfer to a sense of literal heads hammering up through daisies when the sun itself breaks down and the people are raised from their graves at the end of days. It reminds me of the way people are depicted rising from the earth in many paintings of the last judgement, including Michelangelo's.

I think throughout the poem there are resonances of other places in both scripture and poetry. The poetic allusions that stand out to me are what I think is an allusion to Shelley's "Ode to the West Wind" in the third line of stanza one. This would make sense since Shelley is discussiong rebirth and the notion of becoming "one" with something greater (though in Shelley's case, I think in more a Platonic than a Christian sense). I also hear resonances of Lycidas in all the imagery of the sea in relation to death. Given the notion of resurrection from the sea and the religious ideas this is associated with at the end of Milton's poem, I think it was very likely in Thomas' mind as he penned this.

On a final note, I love these lines:

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Where blew a flower may a flower no more
Lift its head to the blows of the rain.

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It reminds me, for some reason of lines from a Simon and Garfunkle song:

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So I'll continue to continue to pretend
My life will never end
And flowers never bend
With the rainfall.

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I doubt there's any real connection between the two, but I wonder if there's some common source, a biblical passage perhaps, about flowers bending in the rain that both poet and songwriters are playing into here.

Anyway, I guess I've said enough for now. I'll let others jump in for their say.

Is there esoteric meaning to some of the lines? I can't understand what these lines in the first stanza mean:

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Dead men naked they shall be one
With the man in the wind and the west moon;

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and

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When their bones are picked clean and the clean bones gone,
They shall have stars at elbow and foot;

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This is why I feel the guts of the stanzas are superficial. They are nice sounding lines, but frankly, unless there is some esoteric meaning that I'm missing, I find these lines hollow.

I was having problems understanding some single lines as well, mostly those Virgil quoted. I was thinking about the line

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Dead men naked they shall be one

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For me, the 'lead' word was "naked". I was wondering why he used the word. If the poem was about people/mankind in general, people don't get buried naked. I can only think of one occassion when people get buried naked and that's mass graves (if that's how it's called) and they're buried in one big hole in the ground - they shall be as one? If that's the case, it might be an allusion to war, maybe holocaust? If not, my other way of reading "naked" was 'stripped of status', therefore equal. In death, all men are equal and 'as one'.

Another line Virgil mentined is

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When their bones are picked clean and the clean bones gone,

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I don't think it's a difficult one, unless I'm missing something. I think that in short it means passing of time. Once buried, the flesh is first to rot away, leaving 'clean' bones. With enough time, even the bones will be gone.

Lines I don't understand:

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With the man in the wind and the west moon;

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They shall have stars at elbow and foot;

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Heads of the characters hammer through daisies;
Break in the sun till the sun breaks down

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I'm not certain that every detail is crystal clear to me either, but I'll do what I can to shed a bit of light on some of the lines people brought up.

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Dead men naked they shall be one
With the man in the wind and the west moon;

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In the first line, I think the "naked" simply refers to all men being equal in death. Also, in art it is traditional to depict the bodies being raised from the grave as being naked (see, for example, the detail from Michelangelo's LJ below), so I don't think this would be at all an unusual or remarkable description for someone familiar with that artistic tradition. Since the poem was published in 1936, it wouldn't be making references to the holocaust.
http://i43.photobucket.com/albums/e3...doD/michLJ.jpg

The second line is trickier. As I said before, I think the reference to the wind may be partly inspired by Shelley's "Ode to the West Wind" in which the wind is symbolic of rebirth and becoming one with the world and with others. I sense that there is some other allusion in this line as well, though that I'm not picking up on. I haven't had a chance to look up any crit. on this poem to see if it's explained somewhere. On a general level I think it just refers to a transcendent state in which the resurected dead become one, not just with one another but with the world and with nature.

On a technical level, I love the false endstop between these lines. If you just read the first of the pair, "Dead men naked they shall be one" then it reads that Dead men shall be one, implying they are one with each other, but when you come to the next line you find that they are "one/ with the man in the wind...." Both Milton and Ben Jonson, among others, use this technique a lot to fold multiple meanings into lines.

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When their bones are picked clean and the clean bones gone,
They shall have stars at elbow and foot;

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I think Jay glossed the first line the way I would. After death the flesh decays from the bones (or is picked off by scavangers), and in time even those bones turn to dust. I took the second line as a reference to them being turned into constellations, or otherwise placed in the heavens among the stars. I love the way the body is eradicated in the first of these lines, but then the second line refers to the "elbow and foot" of the body restored in resurrection.

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Heads of the characters hammer through daisies;
Break in the sun till the sun breaks down

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As I said above, I don't know about his choice of the word "characters" here. I think there's a sense, both of the heads of the resurected bodies hammering through daisies as they break out of the ground, and of the way the dead material of decomposing bodies hammers up through the ground through (by means of) being transformed into dasies. In the second line I think there's both the sense of the flowers both breaking forth out into the sun and breaking down in death and decay until the time when the sun itself shall break down in the end of days.

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Originally Posted by Petrarch's Love

I'm going to have to disagree with ktd. I think the thing that makes the sound of this poem powerful is the repetition, and I think the stanzas each speak to a different purpose. One stanza alone wouldn't have any kind of punch to it. I wouldn't think of this as a memorable poem from just one stanza.

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I don't know what the power or function of these repeated lines are. :confused: It does give the poem a sing-song sound(not in a serious way); but I don't know if that's his aim for such a serious topic. There are multitudes of poems in which one stanza, one line, can carry with it enough weight to create its purpose, and even become more memorable-not for memory's sake. One that pops in my mind is Mending Walls(a poem we discussed in the original Poem of the Week) by Robert Frost. The line 'Good fences make good neighbors' appears in a couple places in the poem and its appearences does creates a more meaningful effect. That is to say the phrase shows, in one sense, the farmer's stubborness to go outside his own viewpoint, and in the same manner, listen to other viewpoints.

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I think part of the reason for the repetion is that he wants to create the feeling of something or someone constantly beating against the one eternal constant, death.

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I'm not clear here. I think death is described in finite terms here. 'Evil,' well...that may be something else.

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Originally Posted by Petrarch's Love

That said, however, I think there's a lot more going on in this poem than first meets the eye. I divided the stanzas roughly into the categories of descriptions of heaven, hell, and earth in relation to death.

1. Stanza one is concerned with those who, "though they sink through the sea they shall rise again." All mankind becoming one in a sort of universal love, and what has been broken repaired. The first

2. The second stanza focuses on those who remain "under the windings of the sea" (in contrast to those who rose from the sea in the first stanza). They "shall not die windily" in the way of those in the first stanza, who "shall be one/ With the man in the wind," and they suffer unending torments which will never cease, without promise of either death or salvation. Their punishments are reminiscent either of the inquisition or of the sufferings of Christian martyrs, but this time without the promise of death and reward. Their bodies, endure torture without even the hope of being broken. One assumes that those described in this stanza find it agony that "death shall have no dominion."

3. The third stanza, is I think the hardest. It seems to describe the earth itself in the face of an apocalyptic end of all days. The first five or so lines describe the things of the earth--the sea, the flower the rain--which will be no more. In the final lines, I'm still not too certain about his choice of the word "characters" I don't know if he is alluding to something or has certain characters in mind or if he is referring generally to all people as characters in the play of life. In any case, I find a wonderful lot going on in these lines:

These lines seem to bridge the gap between the way death works in the world today and the way it will work come the end of days. Now the decomposed bodies of the dead "hammer through" the earth to life again in the form of daisies, which "break in the sun" both in the sense of breaking open and in terms of breaking down again in death themselves. This can also transfer to a sense of literal heads hammering up through daisies when the sun itself breaks down and the people are raised from their graves at the end of days. It reminds me of the way people are depicted rising from the earth in many paintings of the last judgement, including Michelangelo's.

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I don't know how you got all this from those lines. It's good that you derived meaning from the stanzas, though. But the lines are too general for me to deduce anything other than the obvious.

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I think throughout the poem there are resonances of other places in both scripture and poetry. The poetic allusions that stand out to me are what I think is an allusion to Shelley's "Ode to the West Wind" in the third line of stanza one. This would make sense since Shelley is discussiong rebirth and the notion of becoming "one" with something greater (though in Shelley's case, I think in more a Platonic than a Christian sense). I also hear resonances of Lycidas in all the imagery of the sea in relation to death. Given the notion of resurrection from the sea and the religious ideas this is associated with at the end of Milton's poem, I think it was very likely in Thomas' mind as he penned this.

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Even if this is the case, it is a poor attempt to do so by Dylan Thomas.

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Originally Posted by ktd222

I don't know what the power or function of these repeated lines are. :confused: It does give the poem a sing-song sound(not in a serious way); but I don't know if that's his aim for such a serious topic.

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The repeated line is one of the few things I like about this poem. I wouldn't call it sing-song effect, that's a term for rhythmic effect. Here it's a refrain and now that I've absorbed the poem more I think it's a striving for a liturgical effect more than song.

The other thing I like about this poem is the way Thomas weaves the sea imagery/motif throughout the three stanzas. It does pull the poem into a unified wholeness, where otherwise it is dangerously close to being three independent stanzas linked by a common refrain.

In my previous post I only pointed out a few lines that sounded hollow. And in those lines there was a sense that there was an esoteric meaning behind them. Unpack that meaning and you might find the lines worthy. But here are a couple of lines that just sound empty, plain and simple:

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Faith in their hands shall snap in two,
And the unicorn evils run them through;

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and

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Split all ends up they shan't crack;

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That last one sounds like it could be a shampoo comercial. :D

Sorry, that's unfair, but I couldn't resist. ;)

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Originally Posted by Virgil

The repeated line is one of the few things I like about this poem. I wouldn't call it sing-song effect, that's a term for rhythmic effect. Here it's a refrain and now that I've absorbed the poem more I think it's a striving for a liturgical effect more than song.

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The repeated lines do nothing for me. It lacks any type of emotion or purpose after the first stanza.
Don't try and come up with something that's not there :lol: I bet you if I look at these lines close enough I may start rising. Nope, it didn't happen.