How to read "After the first death, there is no other"?

One of the poems behind this poem is Marvell's "To His Coy Mistress".
Both poems are about a refusal to speak. Marvell's poem is an attempt
to induce speech, by argument and by seduction. Thomas's poem resists
the seduction and counters the argument.

"To His Coy Mistress" begins, as Thomas's poem does, with a gesture
towards the end of time. Marvell points to an eschatological horizon,
the threshold where historical time is converted into the eternity of
Christ's reign, in order to contrast the infinity of "desarts of vast
eternity" with the finitude and richness of individual human life.
Thomas's end-time is the triumph of entropy: creation's annulment, a
return to darkness and stillness. Its "Zion" and "synagogue" are
earthly elements, folded into themselves, not tokens of a covenant
with the beyond. Their last silence is what the finitude and richness
of human life must come to.

Whereas Marvell's poem places life and death on opposite sides of a
metaphysical divide, and invites its addressee to choose the "strength
and sweetness" of life while it lasts, Thomas's poem frames life and
death as equal and contiguous aspects of an immanent, natural order.

Thomas says that the burned child is "[d]eep with the first dead", and
has entered into a kind of communality with them. Her grave is not,
then, a "private place", sequestered from history and human belonging.
Her death is not the unique destiny of an individual soul; her "going"
is a property of "mankind" in general. Hence the "blasphemy" and
"murder" of elegiac utterance, which in assigning a specific meaning
to the death of an individual separates that individual from her
common humanity.

It is difficult to know what ironies are being entertained here.
Geoffrey Hill's later "September Song", another child-death-song, also
struggles with the notion that elegy is blasphemous, but regards with
horror the obliteration of individuality in the bureaucratic schema of
mass death. Hill's poem says that it is an elegy "for myself", and
rests on a troubled identification between an individual self and a
specific other. If Thomas's poem refuses that identification, it is
not because it has adopted the perspective of the obliterators: the
point is not that the victim is "merely a statistic".

Is the "first death" in the final line the moral death from which all
the other deaths follow - some manner of original sin? If so, then the
poem would be saying that elegy is misplaced because it bewails
suffering without recognising its moral or political causes. Don't
talk to me about this or that immolated infant: it's Nazism that's the
problem here. I don't find this reading either attractive or
particularly plausible (you could file it under "ideological
pontification and moralistic hand-wringing"). It seems more likely
that the "first death" is the death of those "first dead" with whom
the later dead must be numbered. There is no *other* death, no death
that is not continuous with the common fate of "mankind". The elegist
would perhaps join with the obliterators in regarding some deaths as
more significant than others.

Finally, I don't think that Thomas's poem explicitly affirms really
works for me. Hill's "September Song" acknowledges what "A refusal to
mourn..." seems to want to disavow: the inevitability of individual
identification, or to put it another way the inevitable individuality
of identification, and the moral and cognitive difficulties that this
creates. Hill's poem utters its blasphemy, and is conscious of doing
so, while Thomas's poem declares itself above such lapses. But the
declaration may be ironic: how can one make such a refusal
consistently? Perhaps the denial secretly avows, by exposing its own
hollowness. I do not think that the poem itself makes one reading or
the other necessary; rather, the necessary reading is one that
recognises the ambiguity between them.

Dominic