from Robert Motherwell's 'Elegy for the Spanish Republic' Series (mid-century)

Robert Motherwell, series paintings 'Elegy for the Spanish Republic'

Dylan Thomas published this poem in 1946 and in it, we can see the same linguistic disjunctions and manipulations that Valery says are really the charge of the poet who wishes his language to 'dance' as opposed to 'walk' like prose. We also see the same suspension of the natural, the futility of human thought and action, and the objectivity and lack of pathos in nature -- a throw back to the Naturalists at the turn of the century. But here we also see the poet writing the futile self, the self purposely making himself inert, impotent, calm in the face of rage. He will not 'blaspheme down the stations of the breath/With any further/Elegy of Innocence and youth.' Does nature, itself, become emblematic of mourning here? Is there a transitional event that allows the speaker to transcend what 'was' to what 'is' and does what 'is' have some consequence in the life, the attitude, the vitality of the speaker as he gropes to understand the world after this transition, after the elegaic event? There is, of course, 'the futility of the water' but doesn't this futility also reflect the futility of the speaker? Lodged in nature, do we finally see death as the way we become part of a continuum? Is the moment the speaker enters ' the round/Zion of the water bead/And the synagogue of corn' mark that moment where, contrary to the Naturalists, the 'I' exists within a subtle heaven of mundane, everyday things? And does the child, who resides now 'with the first dead' and who is 'Robed in the long friends, The grains beyond age, the dark veins of her mother,/Secret by the unmourning water' find some absolute being-ness in this forever-ness of her death? Does this speaker appear trapped within the transitional moment, unable to move past it (as we've revisited in some of the work of Fritz Goldberg, Emanuel, Celan, and Char-- even Valery who speaks of the poet's power of manipulation within the context of the futility of that act) or is this speaker imagining the 'now' after transition and coming to understand the present as a post-lapsarian reality to which he must become accustomed, to which he needs to find his own way of living, and going on? Tell me about it ...