Uploaded November 2014 | Updated September 2026, 2 weeks ago
Here's the great Dylan Thomas reading his World War 2 Poem " A Refusal to Mourn the Death, by Fire, of a Child in London" This unusual elegy (which refuses to call itself such) was written amid the carnage of war-torn London and first published in 1946. The dead child is a civilian counterpart to the iconic Unknown Soldier and he commemorates her passing in a torrent of powerful religious images. The poet's ironic 'refusal to mourn' refers to his belief that death is simply too enormous a subject to sum up in mere words, even though words are, of course, the only tools at his disposal.'This poem tells us that Dylan Thomas isn't going to say something. I take it that the child was killed in an air raid, and that Dylan Thomas won't say so because he is refusing to be distracted by thoughts about the war from thoughts about the child herself or about death in general ... his is a refusal to integrate perceptions of the dead girl into a coherent, 'logical' whole which is necessarily inadequate to its object, and to use this misrepresented experience or fate of another person to achieve a false poetic resolution.' (William Empson's article 'To Understand a Modern Poem': 'A Refusal to Mourn the Death, by Fire, of a Child in London' is in Argufying: Essays on Literature and Culture, (Chatto and Windus, 1987)
Kind Regards
Jim Clark
All rights are reserved on this video recording copyright Jim Clark 2014
Here's the great Dylan Thomas reading his World War 2 Poem " A Refusal to Mourn the Death, by Fire, of a Child in London" This unusual elegy (which refuses to call itself such) was written amid the carnage of war-torn London and first published in 1946. The dead child is a civilian counterpart to the iconic Unknown Soldier and he commemorates her passing in a torrent of powerful religious images. The poet's ironic 'refusal to mourn' refers to his belief that death is simply too enormous a subject to sum up in mere words, even though words are, of course, the only tools at his disposal.'This poem tells us that Dylan Thomas isn't going to say something. I take it that the child was killed in an air raid, and that Dylan Thomas won't say so because he is refusing to be distracted by thoughts about the war from thoughts about the child herself or about death in general ... his is a refusal to integrate perceptions of the dead girl into a coherent, 'logical' whole which is necessarily inadequate to its object, and to use this misrepresented experience or fate of another person to achieve a false poetic resolution.' (William Empson's article 'To Understand a Modern Poem': 'A Refusal to Mourn the Death, by Fire, of a Child in London' is in Argufying: Essays on Literature and Culture, (Chatto and Windus, 1987)
Kind Regards
Jim Clark
All rights are reserved on this video recording copyright Jim Clark 2014
