Dylan Thomas’s Deaths and Entrances: The Poet’s Ruling Energy

Abstract

Dylan Thomas’s Deaths and Entrances offers a more searching examination of the poet’s ruling energy and the direction of his activity.With the outbreak of the Second World War, the privilege as a poet also increases his anxiety and responsibility. Thomas seeks to integrate experiences and comprehend the nature of reality, and he also searches for a mode of release from mortal misery. While W.H. Auden, recognizing the value of Kierkegaardian existential philosophy as an avenue to truth, expresses his distrust of the adequacy and authenticity of sensory and imaginative perceptions.The dichotomy remains unresolved in the case of Auden’s contemporaries, Cecil Day Lewis, Stephen Spender, and Louis MacNeice despite their attempt to reconcile the contraries.The divided attitude of the War poets, F.T. Prince, Roy Fuller, Alan Rook, and Keidrych Rhys towards the poetic process of Auden and Thomas indicates the direction of their mind and also implies a value judgement.Walford Davies writes that “after all, attitude and tone can remain richly problematic in poems considered much less difficult than Thomas’s at first reading.” Thomas’s “later poems abound in Christian thought and symbol” according to John Ackerman.The syntactical structure, the vocabulary, construction, and cadence of Thomas’s poems have been analysed in detail by, among others, W. Y. Tindall, Clark Emery, John Bayley, and James A. Davies.The critical studies on Thomas’s later poem, as they remain general, partial and incomplete, have not taken the readers to its central focus. Hence a semantic analysis of Deaths and Entrance is undertaken here to unravel its total meaning suggestive of Thomas’s ruling energy, his effective functioning as a poet in the war time.