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Thanks for that, Jon - it's one of my favourite Thomas poems. Don't know if I agree with some of Sitwell's comments. For example, that he knew he must die young. It seems a romantic gloss in hindsight... I did have the very strong feeling, after reading his collected poems, that Thomas' failures - and they were on the whole magnificent failures - were to do with how he glimpsed and denied certain realities in his poems. The energies in some of his work seem to me rather like those in Van Gogh's paintings, primal and inhuman and ultimately terrifying. His best poems, like this one, are the ones that face that inhuman bleakness. And I think this is a very bleak poem indeed, for all its richness; I think it's a refusal of all those religious imageries it uses so lushly, disdaining them as false comforts that "murder the mankind of her going", as blasphemies which deny that "unmourning" cycle of nature and our own mortality. I take the last line as saying something absolute about finitude. Best A Alison Croggon Blog: http://theatrenotes.blogspot.com Editor, Masthead: http://masthead.net.au Home page: http://alisoncroggon.com