And Death Shall Have No Dominion

Today, in 1953, Dylan Thomas died at St Vincent Hospital in New York City. He was only 39. There are several of his poems at the Poetry Foundation, and there are a couple of readings at the Poetry Archive. I love the contrast in the following poems.
... ... ...

Death, be not proud, though some have called thee

Mighty and dreadful, for thou art not so;

For those whom thou think'st thou dost overthrow

Die not, poor Death, nor yet canst thou kill me.

From rest and sleep, which but thy pictures be,

Much pleasure; then from thee much more must flow,

And soonest our best men with thee do go,

Rest of their bones, and soul's delivery.

Thou art slave to fate, chance, kings, and desperate men,

And dost with poison, war, and sickness dwell,

And poppy or charms can make us sleep as well

And better than thy stroke; why swell'st thou then?

One short sleep past, we wake eternally

And death shall be no more; Death, thou shalt die.
- John Donne

... ... ...

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.
- Dylan Thomas

Two Poems: Norman MacCaig

Many of you know that I have taken a job at the St. John's College Bookstore. In my few weeks there I have had a number of things recommended to me, but this is the best so far: a Scottish poet named Norman MacCaig (1910-1996). He is well known in Scotland, though he won only one award, the Queen's Medal for Poetry. He was trained as a classicist at the University of Edinburgh and taught throughout his life. Like Heaney, his themes are rural and local, but his diction tends to be simpler, less allusive. These are everyday poems. But after my initial readings they seem to bear up under close inspection. Notice the half rhymes in this first one. And I love the final question.

After

Let's choose a pretty word, say, evening,
And climb through it into the past,
Or stand on a towering If, surveying
The rosy kingdoms we have lost.

From every corner creep a thousand
Boredoms saying, Greet us. We're life.
Let's round the sunset up and milk it
Into a jug and drink it off.

Or in the hawthorn let us tangle
Our dreary look like gossamer
To shudder with that sparrow's chirping
And when the dew falls be on fire.

Or drag the distance home and chain it
There in the corner of the room
To charm us with its savage howling
And beg for fragments of our dream.

There's a clue somewhere. Can you find it?
Can you say over and over again
"Love," till its incantation makes us
Forget how much we are alone?
... .... ...

In his later years, MacCaig wrote in a looser line. The images remain controlled, concrete, and lucid. The landscape still figures prominently, but it is distant now, abstracted and measured by the memory of an old man. Somewhere within the last lines of this poem are why I read poetry.

Notations of Ten Summer Minutes

A boy skips flat stones out to sea - each does fine
till a small wave meets it head on and swallows it.
The boy will do the same.

The schoolmaster stands looking out of the window
with one Latin eye and one Greek one.
A boat rounds the point in Gaelic.

Out of the shop comes a stream
of Omo, Weetabix, BiSoDol tablets and a man
with a pocket shaped like a whisky bottle.

Lord V. walks by with the village in his pocket.
Angus walks by
spending the village into the air.

A melodeon is wheezing a clear-throated jig
on deck of the Arcadia. On the shore hills Pan
cocks a hairy ear; and falls asleep again.

The ten minutes are up, except they aren't.
I leave the village, except I don't.
The jig fades to silence, except it doesn't.
... .... ...