Dylan Thomas’ Defiant Elegy: Grief Becomes Growth

The Transformative Power of Poetry: Dylan Thomas as a Mentor

One of the most profound influences I had in my late adolescence was not a football coach, or a teacher, or a friend’s father, but a rather unlikely mentor across time.

Now, as a 35-year-old looking back, I would have chosen a different mentor, but we often don’t see the full consequences of our choices until later reflection.

I was obsessed with a poet named Dylan Thomas.

He was a bum who only held a job as a newspaper reporter early in life and tried to support himself and his family on a poet’s wages.

He died from alcoholism at 38 on a speaking tour in New York, leaving his wife and kids a half-smoked box of cigars and a few rumpled clothes. He was penniless, and he had been for a long time.

But he devoted himself to poetry, and this was what captured me in my youth. His writing, especially when he read it, has such a captivating quality to it.

For my 18th birthday, I asked for the complete recorded collection of his verse on CDs.

I would drive around for hours and listen to his deep, smoker-tinged, sonorous voice becoming almost possessed by his poems as he read. Unlike most poets, he was actually wildly popular during his lifetime.

Today, he is often anthologized but rarely discussed, and I think his best poems have held up over time because of his obsession with the sonic quality of words.

Why Dylan Thomas’ Defiance of Traditional Elegy Reshapes Grief and Loss

He is a hard poet to characterize.

He is from the modern period but doesn’t want to remake anything. He is often seen with a surrealist bent; however, nothing seems that surreal. I would say that he is a Post-Romantic, a Romantic poet who found himself surrounded by Modernism, which is why his poems create a surrealist quality.

However you characterize him, his poetry is best read aloud, and he is really the one able to capture all its nuances and disruptive power.

A poem that has always possessed me is “A Refusal to Mourn the Death, by Fire, of a Child in London.”

An elegy composed at the height of the London fire bombings during WWII, the death of one child becomes the whole of deaths in the war. It is written as an elegy, but immediately in the title, we come across a sort of anti-elegy setup.

An elegy is a poem lamenting the dead, but here the poet is in stark defiance with this traditional form of poetry. He is actively refusing this form.

I’ve always read this poem as if Thomas was expected to deliver a eulogy or write a memorial for a young life that was lost and wanting to escape what happens in those types of situations.

Too often, when a tragedy occurs, we fall into the same rhetorical framework of expressing how they were lost too soon or, as Thomas puts it, an “elegy of innocence and youth.”

By him refusing to fall into the stock sentimentality of the child’s death, he is able to use that one death to situate it into an almost universal place, where the sentimentality of one death becomes the reverence for the sacredness of the cycle of life and death.

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The Sacredness of Breath: How Thomas Reframes Grief and Death in Poetry

For Thomas, the act of mourning in a conventional elegy is “blaspheming down the stations of the breath,” or swearing against the sacredness of our very breath or life.

I feel like you are meant to hear the stations of the cross here, but for Dylan, the traditional Christian sacred and profane split is upended here.

Priority is given to the very body, the breath, rather than the spirit.

And the thing that is so closely linked to the everyday—breathing—becomes exalted into the spiritual, the sacred, in the same way that the “round Zion of the water bead” makes the everyday into something holy.

Since we see that the everyday is now exalted, we see that his refusal to mourn or grieve in the conventional sense would be to denigrate the child’s death as a personal and private thing rather than an integration into this eternal recurrence in the cycles of life and death.

From refusing to mourn her death, he places grief into an inverse relationship to how we conventionally view it.

Grief now is not a personal or performative act but an acknowledgment of the sacredness of the cycles of life itself. It is not a celebration of death, but it is an honoring of the dead with silence and reverence, rather than the reduction to mere symbols of tragedy.

Words said here for this child’s elegy could be said for any child.

Words, although something we try to say out of remembrance, seem to flatten the complexity of life.

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How Dylan Thomas Teaches Us to Reframe Life’s Losses for Personal Growth

I feel like the heart of the poem, especially in that amazing last line, is a vision in which individuals are not isolated but part of a much grander sacred cycle of life and death.

Death becomes a part of a cosmic or divine process of creation and destruction. Grief becomes cosmic.

Loss becomes the vehicle for transcendence in its reflection, a reframing of the negative to the positive.

Loss, whether that is a tragedy like the fire bombings in WWII or a death of a loved one, but even loss in the grander sense, the loss of a relationship, a job, a personal identity, can become, like for Thomas, a source of reverence and community—a link between us in our isolated feelings and the broader scheme of life and death.

Sometimes in those massive shifts in life, where in one instance our world turns upside down, being able to reframe the experience from dark to light can pay dividends.

It’s like going through a brutal breakup and realizing in the depths of that pain that you feel this way because you have a profound capacity to love someone deeply.

We feel pain because we are able to feel love.

If we were able to get over a love quickly, perhaps we didn’t truly love. In all loss, there is this reverse. Grief reveals this.

This is ultimately what the poem teaches us, that all of life is sacred because all of death is sacred.

It is the light and the dark, the yin and the yang—we can’t have one without the other.

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