Dylan Thomas Companion
Auden and Christopher Isherwood set sail for the United States, the
so-called
'All the fun' age ended. Auden's generation of poets'
expectations came to
nothing after the end of the Spanish Civil War, and
they, disillusioned, left
the European continent for good. In the late 1930s
the school of Surrealism
reached England, and Dylan Thomas was one of the few
British authors of the time
who were followers of this new trend in the arts.
He shared the Surrealist
interest in the great abstracts of Love and Death,
and composed most of his work
according to the rules of Surrealism. His first
two volumes, Eighteen Poems and
Twenty-five Poems were published in the
middle of the decade and of this short
surrealistic era as well. Dylan Thomas
was declared the Shelley of the 20th
century as his poems were the perfect
examples of 'new-romanticism' with their'violent natural imagery, sexual and
Christian symbolism and emotional subject
matter expressed in a singing
rhythmical verse' (Under Siege - Robert Hewison,
1977.). The aim of
'new-romanticism' was setting poets free from W.H. Auden's
demand for 'the
strict and adult pen'. In 1933 Dylan Thomas sent two of his
poems to London,
one of which was an earlier version of his famous poem, And
Death Shall
Have No Dominion. It was dated April 1933 in Thomas's notebook and
was
published for the first time in the 18 May 1933 issue of the New
English
Weekly. After its first publication, the poem was altered several
times and got
its final form in Twenty-five Poems, even though Thomas was not
particularly
proud of this work of his, and was not sure about publishing it
for a second
time. The Poem Immediately in its title, the poem has a
reference to the New
Testament, which was one of Dylan Thomas's main
sources of metaphor. The title
(and the refrain of the poem as well), 'And
Death Shall Have No Dominion' has
been taken from the King James Version of
the Scriptures, which, with its
flowing language and prose rhythm, has had
profound influence on the literature
of the past 300 years. 'Knowing that
Christ being raised from the dead dieth no
more; death hath no more dominion
over him. For in that he died, he died unto
sin once: but in that he liveth,
he liveth unto God. Likewise reckon ye also
yourselves dead to be dead indeed
unto sin, but alive unto God through Jesus
Christ our Lord.' Romans
6:9-11 There is another line in the poem, 'Though they
sink through the sea
they shall rise again;' which resembles a line from the
Scripture: 'And
the sea gave up the dead which were in it, and death and hell
delivered up
the dead which were in them: and they were judged every man
according to
their works.' Revelation 20:13 The assertive optimism of the poem
can also be
brought into connection with the traditions of evangelical hymns,
which is
best reflected in the lines '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.' It seems,
that it is this
assertive optimism Dylan Thomas is trying to impose on the
reader, and, perhaps
on himself as well in this poem, maybe in order to keep
his sanity. Being one of
the least obscure of Dylan Thomas's poetry, it was
evident, that of his earlier
woks, beside Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good
Night and The Force That through
the Green Fuse Drives the Flower, And Death
Shall Have No Dominion would catch
public imagination quite easily. The thing
in this poem that drew the attention
of the everyman was the constancy of
hope coming from the notion that everything
is cyclical: though the
individuals perish, 'they shall rise again', and, though
particular loves are
lost, love itself continues. The tone of this poem is quite
sermon-like, and
its atmosphere is rather Christian; yet, the central theme in
it is not
religion, nor the religious beliefs concerning death but the
relationship
between man and nature. Thomas claims in the second stanza that
deliverance
from death is not through religious faith as 'Faith in their hands
shall snap
in two, And the unicorn evils run them through;' but he declares
man's unity
with nature at death: 'Dead men naked they shall be one With the man
in the
wind and the west moon.' The frame of the poem is the title, the first
line,
the refrain from the Bible, repetitive and insistent at the beginning and
the
end of each stanza. Between these lines the poem is full of vivid imagery,
of
which probably the most significant can be found in the above-mentioned
line
('With the man in the wind and the west moon;'). Here Dylan Thomas uses
one of
his most characteristic devices: the transferred epithet, to create a
new image
form 'the man in the moon and the west wind'. Beside his
sophisticated use of
poetic devices, Thomas's poems are full of lively
images, such as 'When their
bones are picked clear and clean bones gone, They
shall have stars at elbow and
foot;', or 'Twisting on racks when sinews give
way, Strapped to a wheel, yet
they shall not break;' which sometimes seem to
be a completely meaningless
confusion of images. This is one characteristic
of Surrealist poetry. In the
case of And Death Shall Have No Dominion this
'confusion' is counterbalanced
with the repetition, therefore the meaning,
the feeling of the poem is
homogeneous, even despite the rather
nothing-to-do-with-each-other images. The
significance of this poem lies in
its being simple and subtle at the same time.
Bibliography
1. A
Dylan Thomas Companion - John Ackerman, 1991 2. All references to
the
Bible from the Bible Gateway (www.gospelcom.net) 3. Dylan Thomas -
Paul Ferris,
1977 4. The Ironic Harvest - Geoffrey Thurley, 1974 5. The
King James Version (KJV)
of the Bible, 1611 6. The Norton Anthology of
English Literature 7. The Oxford
Illustrated History English Literature -
ed. Pat Rogers, 1987 8. The Penguin
History of Literature, The Twentieth
Century - ed. Martin Dodsworth, 1994 9.
Under Siege (Literary Life in
London 1939-1945) - Robert Hewison,
1977