Elegy for Dylan Thomas - Abse

Essentially this poem is a poem to remember the poet Dylan Thomas. Through the first stanza we get an idea of loss and death through the fact that the town is 'smoke laden' this implies something that has been used up or empty and could be a metaphor for the distinguishing of life.

The second stanza is interesting where Abse comments that 'Death was his voluntary marriage'. This could suggest that Dylan Thomas actually wanted to die through the word 'voluntary'. This could link to the poem by Larkin Dockery and Son, as Dockery volunteered to get married and have children, which Larkin saw as the death of a man's freedom. The death of freedom is also similarly represented in Wild Oats where it would be a commitment to fall in love and this is also the same in Talking in Bed where the couple seem to be trapped through marriage when we get the comparison of the indoors and outdoor world. Throughout the rest of this stanza we get the sense that Dylan Thomas has died and Abse is sad about this through words such as 'mortal', 'ghost' and 'dead'. There is also evidence of this within the third stanza through the quote 'can his energy come back'. The fact that Abse mentions his death a lot signifies that Abse may of greatly admired Dylan Thomas and is sad about his death hence why he mentions the death a lot.

It seems as though within the third stanza Abse seems to reflect on the fragility of human life. He describes 'you half-buried heart drunk as a butterfly, or sober as black'. Abse uses the butterfly in order to convey just how fragile life is and that there is literally nothing at all between death and life itself. This is very much the same to how life is hanging like a thread in the Larkin poem Ambulances. We also get the comparison of 'butterfly' and 'black' this could represent the differences between life and death, that life is like a butterfly where you can soar higher and higher and death is just black and represents the end of everything.

The word 'blaspheme' in stanza four could convey a religious element to the poem. Or on the other hand it could suggest that Abse views him as God-like because of his poetry, after all the 'collected legends' could be to do with Thomas's poetry.

Within stanza five we see that through the death of Dylan Thomas his poetry has also died through the quote 'not far ghost but a quotation cries'. Deeper this could mean that Abse is angry that Poets can be replaced by other poets so quickly and that there is a lack of care in the world.

The last stanza reinforces it was a shock that Dylan Thomas died through the quote 'the yoke broke in his head'. This suggests that it was a shock to the rest of society that he had died, however the simple and colloquila ending could suggest that people moved on easily.