¶ … 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...
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."…
