Now
Now - meaning Summary
Refusal Against Death's Logic
Dylan Thomas’s brief, incantatory poem repeatedly insists "Now / Say nay," urging refusal and defiance in the face of decay, death, and fatalistic answers. Surreal, often violent images—rock and crow, fire and handsaw, sun and flower—pair bodily and mystical language to oppose surrender. The voice resists tidy resolutions, privileging contradiction and stubborn, embodied insistence over passive acceptance of fate or tidy moral conclusions.
Read Complete AnalysesNow Say nay, Man dry man, Dry lover mine The deadrock base and blow the flowered anchor, Should he, for centre sake, hop in the dust, Forsake, the fool, the hardiness of anger. Now Say nay, Sir no say, Death to the yes, the yes to death, the yesman and the answer, Should he who split his children with a cure Have brotherless his sister on the handsaw. Now Say nay, No say sir Yea the dead stir, And this, nor this, is shade, the landed crow, He lying low with ruin in his ear, The cockrel's tide upcasting from the fire. Now Say nay, So star fall, So the ball fail, So solve the mystic sun, the wife of light, The sun that leaps on petals through a nought, the come-a-cropper rider of the flower. Now Say nay A fig for The seal of fire, Death hairy-heeled and the tapped ghost in wood, We make me mystic as the arm of air, The two-a-vein, the foreskin, and the cloud.
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