(Ed note: Earlier this month, our friends over at Ideasmyth ran a series post by poet John Foy. His theme was "braving storms" and the posts were so good we're going to share them with you this week. –sdh)
“A Refusal to Mourn the Death, by Fire, of a Child in London” – Here, again, a storm of grief, this time over a young girl who perishes in the firebombing of London during WWII. The poet, Dylan Thomas, doesn’t know the girl who has been incinerated and buried in the rubble. He claims that he will refuse to mourn her death, and on one level he does. If you accept just the denotational gloss, he says that never—until the apocalyptic end of time—will he mourn the child’s death. Such is his “mighty vaunt,” as Seamus Heaney has called it, uttered in “death-defying strains,” but the music of his words is very clearly the orchestration of a monumental sadness. The sorrow is in the syntax. This is the tortured, hyper-dramatic grammar of a voice that is keening operatically.
continue reading here.