I was in 10th grade when I read “A Refusal to Mourn,” by Dylan Thomas. Perhaps like many boys my age, I was stymied by the opening sentence. It wasn’t until years later that I came to understand. Earlier this year I had the opportunity to be a guest-blogger for Ideasmyth, a creative consultancy where Victoria Rowan presides as the fabulous Creatrix-in-Chief. It was in one of my entries for the Ideasmyth blog that I put down some preliminary thoughts on how this Dylan Thomas poem, and that sentence, worked. I then developed those ideas into a short paper I delivered earlier this month at the West Chester Poetry Conference, in a critical seminar on Dylan Thomas led by the excellent and estimable poet R. S. Gwynn, or Sam to those who know him (you can visit his Facebook page here).
My blog entry for today includes a few excerpts from that paper. But please bear with me. I love grammar.
“A Refusal to Mourn the Death, by Fire, of a Child in London” is Dylan Thomas’s monument to an anonymous girl who perished in the firebombing of London during WWII. If you accept the poem’s denotational gloss, Thomas says that he will never cry or pontificate over the death of this girl. Such is his “mighty vaunt,” as Seamus Heaney called it, but as mighty as it may be, the music of the language is in counterpoint to the title and is clearly the orchestration of a monumental sadness. The sorrow is in the syntax. It is the tortured, hyper-dramatic utterance of a poet keening operatically. I’d like to look at how the orchestration works.
The poem is divided into four six-line stanzas, each rhyming ABCABC. Working across these four stanzas are four grammatical sentences, the first of which may be the strangest, most tortured sentence in twentieth-century poetry:
Never 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.
The round Zion of the water bead! (My friends and I in 10th grade went around repeating this phrase, for no other reason than its odd, emotional conviction.) In basic terms, the sentence says that he will never until the apocalyptic end of time mourn the girl’s death. On the page, however, it’s not that simple. The sentence is 83 words long and top-heavy with a massive adverbial clause (in the excerpt below, it is set off in brackets). The adverbial clause contains 52 words, including a 10-word adjectival modifier nested inside. The grammatical subject of the sentence, “I” occurs in line 10 (highlighted in yellow below), more than half way through, followed by its two main verbs, “let pray” and “sow” (underscored below). This opening torrent concludes with another multi-word adverbial modifier (set off in parentheses below), at the end of which is the word that signals the key idea of the poem, “death.”
Never [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).
In its contortion, the syntax conveys the tumult of anger and sadness the speaker feels facing the girl’s obliteration, even as he claims that he will never cry for her. The energy pent up in this crazy syntax reflects, to some degree, the horror that generated the expression. Let’s look at how this mega-sentence draws to a close. Here is the schematized subject-predicate phase of the sentence:
[I] shall [never] 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.)
The phrase “to mourn / The majesty and burning of the child's death” is an infinitive verbal phrase functioning as an adverb, modifying the two main verbs, “let pray” and “sow.” We see, therefore, that this massive opening sentence of the poem begins with an adverbial construction, and it closes with the same kind of construction, albeit shorter, at the end of which is lodged the central phrase of the poem, “the child’s death.” The positioning is significant. This phrase is located in a grammatically less powerful syntactic unit, an adverbial phrase, which limits its rhetorical punch. Thomas showcases the phrase but subtly limits its power. Secondly, that phrase “the child’s death” is grammatically buried at the bottom of a vast sentence that is heaped upon it. The syntax, we might say, sets up a linguistic equivalence for the child buried under the rubble.
For all its teetering at the cliff, the meaning of this psychotic sentence is, in fact, construable, and the sentence is grammatically correct. It is a masterful demonstration of control over grammar and meaning. Thomas acknowledges, in the poem, that flesh and bone are subject to disintegration, but he simultaneously demonstrates how the poet, taking a stand against mayhem, can integrate his material into a life-affirming verbal structure that coheres. The determination to write something this complex and the effort involved in getting all the parts to settle and putting all the right words in the right places to rhyme is an act of love and a gesture of survival, maybe even triumph, which puts this poem on the side of life.
Here’s an audio clip of Dylan Thomas reading “A Refusal to Mourn.”
My thanks again to David Lehman and Stacey Harwood for having me back as a guest-blogger this week.
Best,
John
It is an amazing sentence. Thank you for the syntactical analysis of Thomas's poem. I always loved the 'synagogue of the ear of corn." I am also a sucker for a poem, or self-contained passage from a long poem, that consists of one mighty syntactically complicated sentence -- the opening of "Out of the Cradle Endlessly rocking", for example.
Posted by: DL | June 20, 2014 at 06:13 PM