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In the article, "Ezra Pound: The Value of Incoherence," we argued that Pounds' poetry indicated mental instability, a characteristic which had enabled him to achieve special success writing abstract poetry3/4 poetry that does not represent or create objective reality through logical structure. In "The Abstract Paintings of Wallace Stevens," it was that Wallace Stevens, a poet who loved to use the term "abstract" to refer to his painterly poetry, drew inspiration from abstract painting that enabled him to create excellent abstract poetry. So far we have been working with a definition of "abstract poem" as "a poem that does not have a logical paraphrase." Such a poem represents and creates subjective reality through illogical or alogical structure (structure to which the terms "logical" and "illogical" are irrelevant-such as a Surrealist poem that paints a dream).
In this article, let us turn our attention to the poetry of Dylan Thomas, the great Welsh poet who at the age of eighteen began writing the poems that would make his reputation. For some reason, he wrote his most popular poems at a very young age, then won his reputation as the most popular reader of poetry in the twentieth-century when he lived as a chronic alcoholic whose poetic powers were always on the wane. Probably less than fifteen or twenty of his poems are the widely anthologized favorites that made his reputation and of these, some are very difficult to paraphrase at all and even more are very difficult to paraphrase in part.
What does it mean to say that an abstract poem does not have a logical paraphrase? It means that either the poem has no paraphrase at all, or its paraphrase is illogical. A paraphrase is "a restatement of a passage giving the meaning in another form, usually for clearer or fuller exposition." (Webster's Third New International Dictionary) A paraphrase of a poem turns the poem into prose. If a poem can be paraphrased, we know what the implied sentences of the poem say3/4 we know what the poem means when restated in prose. Knowing this is of major value when dealing with some of the more difficult twentieth-century poems. This is because if a poem does have a paraphrasable meaning, mastering the poem requires that someone discover the paraphrase. A prose paraphrase can be examined, tested, and evaluated more easily than an inscrutable, beautiful poem that leaves us speechless.
In restating the poem in prose we realize we will lose some of the meaning and/or value of the poem, but we content ourselves if we can paraphrase the central train of thought of the poem. By paraphrasing the poem, we prove to ourselves that we have approached to the heart of the aspect of the poem's meaning, if any exists, that can be stated in grammatical prose sentences.
The following lines are from the Dylan Thomas poem, "The Force That Through the Green Fuse Drives the Flower":
The force that through the green fuse drives the flower
Drives my green age; that blasts the roots of trees
Is my destroyer.
And I am dumb to tell the crooked rose
My youth is bent by the same wintry fever.
The rest of the poem follows a similar pattern, so as an example of a useful paraphrase, take that of W. S. Merwin: . . . the doom with life is . . . described . . . and the compassion makes the poet at once wish to be able to communicate with all other things that are doomed, to tell them he understands their plight because his own is similar, and makes him feel the depth to which he is inarticulate and painfully unable to do so.
This poem is one of the clearest poems written by Thomas. Compare the first stanza of a more difficult poem, "Light Breaks Where No Sun Shines."
Light breaks where no sun shines;
Where no sea runs, the waters of the heart
Push in their tides;
And, broken ghosts with glow-worms in their heads,
The things of light
File through the flesh where no flesh decks the bones.
One useful paraphrase of the poem states that each stanza in the poem balances life against death. The first stanza balances life at conception with the moment after death when the body begins to decay. The general validity of the paraphrase is clear; however, minute particulars of the poem such as "broken ghosts with glow-worms in their heads/The things of light/File . . ." remain without any paraphrase that accounts for them. The fine detail of these particulars asks for more than a general statement about conception versus decay. To answer this need, the paraphraser offers the following:
At death (when boneless worms, like miners, tunnel through the cadaver, and when the paraphraser has found the "broken ghosts" to be "boneless worms, like miners" and "glow-worms in their heads,/The things of light" to be "the life-energy" that "breaks away from" the body. (Personally I think I read "glow-worms" and "Things of light" as referring to the postulated souls of worms, and the rest as Emery has it.) His paraphrase is fascinating, and its interpretation of the entire poem is equally compelling.
Paraphrasing involves making a leap into prose, in fact, translating one language into another. Mistranslations may occur even in the best paraphrases. With that cautionary word in mind, I offer an illogical paraphrase of the Thomas poem, "And Death Shall Have No Dominion"3/4 illogical not because my act of paraphrasing it is illogical, but because the poem is at heart illogical, which makes the poem an abstract poem3/4 it does not employ a logical structure and thus does not represent objective reality.
One would think that illogical structure would be hard to sneak by the reader though. Examine the following idea:
Throughout our life on earth, the reality of death gives us a heavy burden to bear,
but after death, death has no dominion because we are dead. We cannot die again.
This is the theme of the poem. The theme would be logical if the poem affirmed the reality of a life after death because then of course we would finally master death, but the poem does not do this. As far as the poem is concerned, death leaves us "dead as nails." Clearly there is no way, logically speaking, that we can claim "dead as nails" implies that death has no dominion over us. Quite the opposite. Oh, in a minor way it is true of course that death has no dominion over us if we are dead and insentient because we cannot know anything, feel anything, imagine anything, or think anything, so of course we cannot know, feel, imagine, or think the burdensome thought of death, but that interpretation is valid only as a joke (and death shall have an old bunion?) and the poem is not a joke. How then, does this illogical poem work its magic and win our hearts?
It works the way many of the great successes of Dylan Thomas work3/4 by veiling the explicit statement of a theme behind the grandeur of rhetoric whose power is almost unimaginable apart from the poems that bear witness to its existence. The poem cannot be understood-is not meant to be appreciated. The power of particulars, of images, hypnotize, and this power only approaches, does not declare, the central concern, which we intuit and only half-apprehend. It is as though the theme of the poem is the ethereal mist of a Turner landscape. One can, of course, force an exact interpretation, but even if one forces the right one, it will be half-lost when the poem is read because the poem does not fully admit to the authority of unifying idea, does not fully desire one.
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.
The poem urges us to mistake the dignity granted to the dead by poetic genius for the lasting victory over death which the theme of the poem fails to grant us. How, then, does the poem finally succeed? Through the tragic failure of its attempt to conquer death through excellence and beauty. The poem represents one more eloquently crafted, brave and poignant cry in the face of death, a cry that reminds us of Desdemona smothered by Othello, Cleopatra with her asp in hand, or King Lear raging madly outdoors with his fool.
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.
One can place any utterance, even a nonparaphrasable one, at the heart of a poem3/4 a noisy kiss as well as a logical plea for love in the manner of John Donne, a death yell as well as a carefully constructed, last speech. Underneath the apparent chaos of abstract poetry, we may find no undergirding at all, or we may find almost anything.
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.
In Romans:6:9 the following passage appears: ". . . we believe that we shall also live with him: Knowing that Christ being raised from the dead dieth no more: death hath no more dominion over him." Thomas is as thoroughly Bible-influenced as any poet, so is it is likely that this is the source of the poem's title and refrain. But the poem lacks a Christian viewpoint. How does such a broken theme originate? We do well to remember that the eighteen-year-old writing the poem may have written it in an ironic fit (sure, right, sure death has no dominion, right), or torn between the desire to affirm traditional religious ideas and the desire to criticize them, or half-mad on a strange adolescent day in an inexplicable, incomprehensible mood. Most often, scholars who study poetry encounter poems that are full of well-formed logic, but poems can spring out of many of our less transparent moods as well as out of our transparent ones, and occasionally a great poem can spring out of the mind of an adolescent who has not learned the major lessons of adulthood, among them-always to adopt a clear point of view whether you can honestly call it yours or not
An adolescent is more likely than an adult to be totally honest about the moment at hand rather than try to cover up-an adolescent is more likely to confess his transitory feelings. (That is one of the hall-marks of the sophomoric poem, after all-the poem that rarely achieves the greatness of a Dylan Thomas poem, although it has here.) The differences between the adolescent and the adult are clear from the way many of the poem's first adult readers, eager for a voice of traditional affirmation, responded to the poem as though it were a traditional expression of faith, and it is clear from the way many adults today respond to the poem-hopeful that a confession of unbelief cannot lie at the poem's heart. Best admit the poem is not the poem of an adult-what adult could have achieved the beauty or brilliance of its swagger-in-the-face-of-hopelessness? Ah, a poem such as that gives us all hope that we can be true to what we feel, whatever we feel, even if it makes no sense at all, long enough to get it down on paper. |
