What do you think this Dylan Thomas line means (Read details)?

To me, it is about the shock and emotional displacement the first time one hears of a child dying. There is a real sense of disruption to the order of the world when a child dies, the disappearance of potential, the failing of future joys and glories.

And Thomas is stating that the usual mourning of lost innocence and lost youth is perfunctory and lacks conviction. To honor the child, he will live life fully.

@zenvelo Excellent interpretation.

I’d agree with zenvelo’s interpretation of what Thomas is trying to say, but I’d disagree with Thomas. The first death is pretty horrific, but additional one’s don’t get any easier, and I think make us value the life’s around us even more.

Keeping it really simple (which I know is a mistake when reading carefully-written poetry), i hear that there are no do-overs. When you die, you die.

I’ll go back later and reread the entire poem.

I read it twice and think it’s about a man saying he won’t mourn the beauty of this child’s death because perhaps she lived a pretty crappy life. Death is her beautiful release.

@KNOWITALL That’s an interesting take on it. I like that interpretation.

I read it differently. In the first stanzas, he talks about the “darkness” as a generative force behind the living world, and from which it emerges. I don’t think he’s equating this darkness to death. He seems to use “death” to refer to the event, not a condition. The darkness isn’t “dark” in the sense of menace; it’s dark in the sense of unknowable-ness. It’s like an obscure but sacred potential that gets expressed as this living world.

He foresees his own merger with that darkness, rejoining the sacred potential manifest in the dew drop and the ear of corn.

His refusal to shed a tear for this girl comes from his conviction that the event of death is part of the natural order, and has its own nobility and rightness, not to be profaned by wishing things were otherwise. He sees the girl as having dissolved back into this dark source, where she mingles with all that has ever been and will be. Perhaps it’s in this sense that there is no “other” after this death.

@thorninmud Interesting and that would be born out by his nature imagery which is also wrapped up in religious symbolism

Many people already know this, but when a very young Bob Zimmerman left Hibbing, Minnesota for New York City to pursue a career in singing / songwriting, he felt that he needed a better “stage” name.

He was in a Lower Manhattan bar where Dylan Thomas was known to have spent many hours drinking, and thought…“THAT will be my new name…..Bob Dylan….”

This is my reading; I’m not consulting some expert’s interpretation.

I think he’s saying that all death is one; that from the beginnings of humanity, mortality is part of the package, and it doesn’t set anyone apart; rather, it unites us.

So, he says, he’s not going to “murder / The mankind of her going”—not going to detract from her absorption into the common lot of humanity—by treating it as something unusual. An “elegy of innocence and youth” would “blaspheme down the stations of the breath.”

The child lies “deep with the first dead”—the first dead, the elders of our race. Death has been with us from the beginning, and it won’t end until the world ends (“the last light breaking”). Not only death but the mourning of death is a human thing, not part of unconscious nature (“by the unmourning water / Of the riding Thames”), and every death is all that one same death.

@Jeruba Thank you. You put it very well and that makes sense. I have taught the poem but it still baffles me a bit.

Dylan Thomas is always obscure to me and he isn’t my favourite poet. Death is enormous and absolute and is trivialised by mourning or sentiment is what I make of it. It is an event too large to be comprehended or put behind you or repeated.

I think that it means that he has already suffered “the first death” of another, closer to him, which has robbed him of the capacity to mourn for any other.

What was it that Stalin is reputed to have said? “A single death is a tragedy; a million dead a statistic.” The poet had already suffered his tragedy. Any more after that are just statistics.

@CWOTUS Yes, that was one take I had on it.

I much prefer the New England directness of Robert Frost in Out, Out -. But until just now I had not recognized where the title came from.

@CWOTUS Yes, Robert Frost! Did you ever read “Home Burial”?

I think it means exactly what it says. “After the first death, there is no other” – can it really be any clearer? It’s a beautiful line and Dylan Thomas is an amazing poet.

@tups The question is “there is no other” for whom? Certainly there is no other for the person who died but I think Thomas is referring to the person who is asked to mourn and that is what I question. I agree that Thomas is a great poet but I find this poem, while lovely, to be very complex.