Thanks, Dominic, for the development of this! Smart.
Of course the imagination leaps here to consider Death as a Coy Mistress,
etc. What a crazy courtship for most of us it is!
Stephen V
> 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
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