But it's also, to me, a statement of resignation, of the realisation that after the blow of that first loss has worn off, nothing else will ever feel that raw again. On the one hand, it's a return to a belief in the hereafter, to a blessed faith in the justice of the after life. It's always seemed to me that that is a double-edged line. "After the first death, there is no other." Thomas writes. Children should not have to die, but once we recognise that they will, and that there is nothing all our love can do to protect them, then we are left with no consolation but that of granting them the dignity of their deaths. There's a deep sense of hurt here, a sense of shocked innocence, of being awakened by pain into a new and more hazardous world. It's a complex idea, but Thomas manages it exquisitely, finding that pitch-perfect balance between indignation and sorrow, between denial and heartbreak, between the tortured and the elegaic. Thomas is the acme of lyrical intensity - the poet who most perfectly marries rhythm of language to complexity of image (though, if we're going by pure sound, there's always Hopkins, of course).Ī Refusal to Mourn is, to my mind, one of Thomas's finest poems. You ask for Dylan Thomas, I give you Dylan Thomas. The grains beyond age, the dark veins of her mother,Īfter the first death, there is no other. Nor blaspheme down the stations of the breathĭeep with the first dead lies London's daughter, The mankind of her going with a grave truth The majesty and burning of the child's death. In the least valley of sackcloth to mourn Tells with silence the last light breaking