A Refusal to Mourn

It is October and traditionally as the days grow crisper,  I exchange my gin for scotch (or Canadian whiskey).  It is the time when I dig out my broken-backed copy of the Dylan Thomas' Collected Poems.  The two are inter-related, of course.  Thomas is meant to be read out loud with the book in one hand and a drink in the other.  The birthday poems, "Poem in October" or "poem on his birthday' are my favorites and I have quoted them before in this blog. To be shouted to the heavens in defiance! Yes!

But today's poem is a good closure in my mind to the last few posts on Morgan.  You can read a poem over and over again and then, one day, it finally clicks and you understand exactly what the poet meant.  Why?  Is it that the puzzle of the words is solved? Or is because of the experiences you bring to a poem unlock its secrets?  Is the poem an empty vessel for our emotional experiences, or a source and repository of images and ciphers that explain and illuminate?

A refusal to mourn the death, by fire, of a child in London

Never until the mankind making
Bird beast and flower
Father 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 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.

Image Source