Grado en Estudios Ingleses

Comentario de Textos Literarios en Lengua Inglesa

Tutora del Centro Asociado Gregorio Maran, Madrid
Tutor: Jess CORA ALONSO
A Refusal to Mourn the Death, by Fire, of a Child in London
By Dylan Thomas (1914-1953)
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

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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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Source: Dylan Thomas, Miscellany Two. Including A Visit to Grandpas and Other Stories
and Poems. London: J. M. Dent and Sons, 1966, rptd. 1974, 12.

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Questions for reflection and discussion about the text:

Before approaching the text from any critical point of view, it is vital to read (i.e.
understand) and know a text very well. This entails paying attention to:
1) such formal aspects such as: rhythm, meter, rhyme, vocabulary (archaisms,
allusions, echoes of previous poems, etc.), figurative language and other rhetorical
devices;
2) aspects appertaining to the content: the theme and subject matter of the poem, its
tone, voice, attitude of the poetic I, etc. constituting the general meaning of the
poem.
In fact form and content are inseparable for details and aspects of the former do constitute
the latter, but reading carefully all the formal aspects first make it easier to understand,
discuss and interpret the meaning of the poem. Understanding and interpreting a poem
always requires several in-depth readings, looking up words in a good dictionary, finding
information on cultural references, etc. A mere first, superficial reading is never enough.
Here are some questions or tasks that you must bear in mind when discussing and
interpreting the poem.

1. Whats the metre and rhyme, if any, of the poem? Bear in mind that scanning lines
of poems is not done in the same way as in Spanish literature. Conventions are
different.
2. The use of alliteration is prominent in the poem. Identify examples. What is the
effect of this? Is there any connection between this repetition of sounds and the
meaning of the poem?
3. Pay attention to the syntax and punctuation of the poem, especially in the first
three stanzas. Work out the syntax that allows for a coherent reading. Does the
author use conventional punctuation? What is the effect of this in connection with
the "meaning" or "possible" message of the poem?
4.

Once you have done the previous task, pay attention to the division of the poem
in stanzas. Is there a coincidence between the syntax, the content, and the
stanzas? What does this suggest?

5. Discuss and interpret the figurative language of the each stanza in order to form
a coherent interpretation of the poem. Be alert to the use of metaphors, puns,
paradoxes, and allusions (to the Bible and previous literature and literary
conventions) and what they mean and suggest.

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