Lies, Cons,and the American Way

[Alexiev]

https://poets.org/poem/and-death-shall-have-no-dominion

Here's a link to the poem (I can't copy and past well on my phone).

The "meaning" becomes clearer when you read the whole poem. The title of the poem is a biblical quote about the resurrection of Jesus. However, Thomas reinterprets that quote to suggest a different kind of immortality.

"Though lovers be lost, love shall not...." This may be seen as having many possible "meanings". The love we have for our children, for example, teaches them how to love, and they pass that on to their children for generations untold. But the line also hints at Corinthians 13: "Love never faileth". Its meaning is ambiguous and multifaceted.

I could go on and on, but I'm not good at typing on my phone. "Der tod est gros", wrote Rilke. Death is huge. But Thomas, although agreeing, says that death doesn’t rule. Even those who are tortured on the rack and wheel
"have stars at elbow and foot".

Still, the poem's meaning is inseparable from the poem. It involves a feeling the poem creates through rhythm, sound, word choice, and meaning. That, I think, is what Frost was suggesting

[Alexis Jacobi]

Thomas’ prose is beautiful. This is the beginning of a story published in The Map of Love (1939).

The Orchards

HE HAD DREAMED that a hundred orchards on the road to the sea village had broken into flame; and all the windless afternoon tongues of fire shot through the blossom. The birds had flown up as a small red cloud grew suddenly from each branch; but as night came down with the rising of the moon and the swinging-in of the mile-away sea, a wind blew out the fires and the birds returned. He was an apple-farmer in a dream that ended as it began: with the flesh-and-ghost hand of a woman pointing to the trees. She twined the fair and dark tails of her hair together, smiled over the apple-fields to a sister figure who stood in a circular shadow by the walls of the vegetable garden; but the birds flew down on to her sister's shoulders, unafraid of the scarecrow face and the cross-wood nakedness under the rags. He gave the woman a kiss, and she kissed him back. Then the crows came down to her arms as she held him close; the beautiful scarecrow kissed him, pointing to the trees as the fires died.

I’m sort of glad we are done with merciless politics!

[Alexis Jacobi]

... an ironic wrench in the gears of nihilism:

Death shall have all dominion,
on the road to oblivion.