A Refusal To Mourn The Death, By Fire, Of A Child In London

From the last line of the poem: "After the first death there is no other", one can assume that after physical death on Earth, there is no other because the soul is either in eternal life or eternal death (non-existence). The lines: "Tells with silence the last light breaking" further explains this by stating that once the individual dies, he/she will not be able to experience the life that continues on on Earth. Further images of death: "Robed in the long friends" may refer to worms/maggots which are symbolic for corruption (of the physical body) and thus of reunification of eternity. The "Zion of the water bead/ And the synagague of the ear of corn" is alluding to the and of the world as a return from differentiated identity to elemental unity. The words "Zion" and "synagogue" are religious diction suggesting the theme of death and religion. The phrase "stations of the breath" in the lines "The mankind of her with a grave truth/ Nor blaspheme down the station of the breath" recalls to the "Stations of the Cross" in which Jesus Christ approaches his inevitable death. "Grave truth" is a pun, which if translated says: "lost reality". Overall, one interpretation of this poem is the view of Death as being a Natural Process which can be regarded as good or bad.

During analysing Dylan Thomas' work you require some previous knowlege of his other poems.
I disagree the theme religion relates with this poem. Yes there are religious references but Dylan is not a religous man. He uses religion to express himself.

"Robed in the long friends" however I do agree with you and if you read any other of his poetry you will notice further refrences to worms and maggots.
A famous quote from Shakespeare (Hamlet I believe) you will notice a quote which percives he has had ideas from this play.
Also your theory on death on Earth leading to eternal or non eternal life are but your personal views.
It is known Dylan Thomas had his own theory about life after death. He believed life was a journey through water. And you will notice many differnt quotes in all his poety about this.
Famously on Poem On His Birthday "One man through his sundered hulks...."

-Sarah

This is one of my favorite poems of those I have read by Thomas or by others. Its delight in metaphor, in condensing multiple thoughts i.e, in the least valley of sackcloth" conjuring up the psalmist's valley of the dead, sackcloth and ashes of grief, etc. and this goes on all through this wonderfully imagistic poem. But the technical prowess never supplants a sense of his deep feeling for this now, through his "refusal to mourn" monumental loss. For the child who he ironically refuses to mourn is not merely mourned but apostrophized as being "robed in the long friends, the dark veins of her mother, secret by the unmourning waters of the riding Thames" - she is not only monumental, but beyond mourning not because of petulance but because of her transcendece and apotheosis. "After the first death there is no other" conceit goes beyond the afterlife - it simply suspends the question with the positive thought that not so much after life that ends in death, but after the death that is uintrinsic to life - there will not be another, a loss, which unlike life, we need not mourn for. A magnificent poem that is most of all a pleasure to read and to listen to merely in terms of its conceits and its language.

This poem has haunted me for many years. On reading the last line, it seemed entirely clear what Dylan Thomas was saying - that there is a depth of grief that one can go to only once. Upon coming to grips with the horror of it, one can no longer be so craven as to assume the ability to truly grasp the totality of death or to even presume the ability to go there again and again without losing one's self in it.

The third stanza states:

I shall not murder
The mankind of her going with a grave truth
Nor blapheme down the stations of the breath
With any further
Elegy of innocence and youth

That is, to truly and fully feel the horror of that particular death, after so many others - whether personal or representative of humanity's destructiveness - would both be futile and lead us to our own destruction.

In the end, wasn't it Dylan Thomas's own inability to deal with death that killed him?

I teach High School literature and we took this poem apart as part of a unit on Modern Poetry.

Thomas has a theology, expressed in this work, which is cyclical in nature. When we die, we return to nature as our component atoms. "enter again the round Zion of the water bead and the synagogue of the ear of corn." We are born from darkness "Mankind making / bird beast and flower / fathering and all humbling darkness"; when we die we return to the darkness of the earth.

I see this as a cycle: when we die we become atoms which then form other bodies. IF one views this as cyclical, THEN the death of the first person completes the cycle. Everyone dying thereafter is part of the past dead and becomes part of the future living.

While I agree with earlier comments on Thomas' construction of a cyclic nature to all life I think that the poem can be read from another angle that derives its meaning from the final line. In saying that 'After the first death there is no other,' a second layer of meaning implies that while people have always died, the first death of a loved one renders all other deaths immaterial. That first death of a loved one might as well be the first death ever, because until that event, the poet's core sense of invulnerability remained intact (and it can only die once). While Thomas talks about the nature of death as omnipresent and part of a cycle of nature, he also conveys the egocentricity of all humans, that our own expereinces can feel like the only truth in the moments in which the earths stops for a fraction, whether out of exquisite joy or deep tragedy.