Explore "A Refusal to Mourn the Death, by Fire, of a Child in London" by Dylan Thomas on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
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.
I shall not murder
The mankind of her going with a grave truth / Nor blaspheme down the stations of the breath / With any further / Elegy of innocence and youth.
Deep with the first dead lies London's daughter,
Robed in the long friends, / The grains beyond age, the dark veins of her mother, / Secret by the unmourning water / Of the riding Thames.
After the first death, there is no other.