And death shall have no dominion

by Dylan Thomas (Collected Poems 1934-1953, edited by Walford Davies and Ralph Maud, Phoenix)

And death shall have no dominion.

Dead men naked they shall be one

With the man in the wind and the west moon;

When their bones are picked clean and the clean bones gone,

They shall have stars at elbow and foot;

Though they go mad they shall be sane,

Though they sink through the sea they shall rise again;

Though lovers be lost love shall not;

And death shall have no dominion.

And death shall have no dominion.

Under the windings of the sea

They lying long shall not die windily;

Twisting on racks when sinews give way,

Strapped to a wheel, yet they shall not break;

Faith in their hands shall snap in two,

And the unicorn evils run them through;

Split all ends up they shan't crack;

And death shall have no dominion.

And death shall have no dominion.

No more may gulls cry at their ears

Or waves break loud on the seashores;

Where blew a flower may a flower no more

Lift its head to the blows of the rain;

Though they be mad and dead as nails,

Heads of the characters hammer through daisies;

Break in the sun till the sun breaks down,

And death shall have no dominion.

Death does not rule. There will be no country where death holds court and makes laws; we may die, but death does not ever possess us.

Death may be an inevitable passing of what we were while alive, but it doesn't mean that death can govern us when we are dead.

The universality of our physical existence is the emphasis when the poet says “Dead men naked they shall be one” - we are returned to our block humanity once we have eschewed our individuality through lack of a heartbeat. The bones are “picked clean” by insects and animals; the clean bones weather and are blown away by the wind or assimilated into the soil (the dead are recycled). The stars at elbow and foot mark out the dead as if their spirits are recorded in the sky above.

The mad, in death, will be sane and the drowned will “rise again” because in being dead we are also released from the shackles that bound us in life, be they physical or mental or the means of our death.

We cannot be caged by the moment of dying; in dying we are, in effect, set free, even if oblivious. And when we are remembered by the living we transcend the oblivion of death, at least in the minds of those left behind. We are given immortality by the love of others.

When Thomas talks of the victims of torture on the racks or the wheel, it is as if he is calling up the myriad dead of centuries from the bottoms of all the oceans, “Under the windings of the sea”. Even if “Faith in their hands shall snap in two” because they have lost that faith and are at the mercy of their torturers, they themselves cannot be broken because death cannot keep them beyond the point of their passing.

When the metaphorical lance of a unicorn horn runs them through (the reference to unicorn might also be heraldic, as used in a coat of arms), impaling them, then Thomas tells us “Split all ends up they shan't crack”. “All ends” could mean various things, but for me it is the ends of the ideas contained in an individual being split like logs, even while the essence of the individual remains.

Words describing the result of physical impact such as “break” and “crack” also confer a rhythmic verbal energy, emphasised further when the “Heads of the characters hammer through daisies” of those that “be mad and dead as nails”. It seems that the spirits of the dead rise up through the sod, and when they “Break in the sun till the sun breaks down,” it could be that they break up themselves in a war of attrition with the Sun, until the Sun itself collapses. Or perhaps they break in the Sun as one might break in a horse.

The poem is an incantation against the finality of death. It propels us past the wall of death that some of us see as insurmountable, and makes us integral to the cycle of the Universe that knows nothing of death as loss, but everything about death as an evolutionary process of life.

frieda.hughes@thetimes.co.uk

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