September 11, 2001, Terrorists Hijacked Four Commercial

¶ … September 11, 2001, terrorists hijacked four commercial airliners full of fuel for transcontinental flights and sent three of them hurtling into occupied buildings. The nation reeled with shock, not only from the brutal attacks, but from the sudden loss of so many lives. Even those who did not personally know the deceased felt injured and shaken. Some people raged at the unfairness of it all. Others begged those trapped in the crushed buildings to "hang on" long after it became clear that rescue efforts were futile.

Even the most devoutly religious struggled to reconcile their faith with their sense of outrage and grief. As the months passed after the attack, though, a healing process slowly began. The national focus shifted slightly to encompass rebirth as well as death, and several magazines and television news programs featured "Sept. 11 Widows" who had given birth to new babies since the attacks. Dylan Thomas, although he had died nearly fifty years earlier, would have understood all of these reactions.

He was fascinated with life and the inevitable death that follows, and his poetry, full of stark, graphic, and often disturbing images, is simultaneously a howl of pain and a psalm of understanding if not acceptance. The work of Dylan Thomas remains relevant and important to 21st century readers for at least three reasons: First, Thomas deals with universal themes. Second, his creative, even shocking, use of language brings a fresh perspective to timeless subjects. And finally, Thomas does not provide any easy or "pat" answers.

He merely explores age-old questions. Thomas's themes include the unity of life, the continuing process of life and death, and the life-link between generations. His poem "We Who Are Young Are Old," for instance, embodies all of these ideas.

"Age sours before youth's tasted in the mouth," he writes, and adds a few lines later that death comes to, "The white, the black, the yellow, and mulatto / From Harlem, Bedlam, Babel, and the Ghetto..." In another poem, "All That I Owe the Fellows of the Grave," he writes that he owes the dead, "all the flesh inherit." These ideas -- the realization that all living things die and that the process of birth and death links the generations -- are almost as old as humankind itself.

Indeed, authors who tackle these themes run the risk of straying into cliche. Or, as one critic points out, "When [great truths] are expressed in conventional language, and through conventional rhetoric, they become inert and banal." He adds, "But Thomas approached them through his own introspections and undertook to revitalize them through his 'devious craftsmanship' of language" (Korg 27). This brings us to the second great strength of Thomas's work. The pictures he draws with words remain as vivid and accessible to readers today as they were to his contemporaries.

In "Take the Needles and the Knives," for instance, he offers one of his many ghoulish descriptions of death: "Take the needles and the knives / Put an iron at the eyes, / Let a maggot at the ear / Toil away till music dies." These words and descriptions are not easily forgotten. A final strength of Thomas's work is that he asks hard questions without proposing easy answers.

He accepts death in the sense that he knows it is a part of life and must be, but he offers no platitudes about its goodness or rightness. Indeed, in one of his most famous poems, he urges, "Do not go gentle into that good night.

/ Rage, rage against the dying of the light." In another poem, "Out of the Pit," he questions, "[W]here's God's my Shepherd, God is Love? / No loving shepherd in this upside life." In his avoidance of the "quick fix," Thomas respects his own -- and his readers' -- fear and hatred of death while acknowledging its reality. Although Thomas Dylan died in 1953, his work remains fresh and relevant due to his focus on universal.