A Refusal to Mourn the Death, by Fire, of a Child in London
A Refusal to Mourn the Death, by Fire, of a Child in London - meaning Summary
Refusing Conventional Elegy
Thomas refuses a conventional elegy for a child killed by fire, resisting private grief and rhetorical sentiment. He frames the death within elemental, sacred cycles — water, seed, and religious imagery — insisting the child belongs to a vast, unmourned continuity rather than a personalized tragedy. The poem rejects added lamentation as untrue to the nature of death, closing on the finality that follows the "first death."
Read Complete AnalysesNever 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 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.
Feel free to be first to leave comment.