DYLAN THOMAS’S POEMS :After the Funeral (In memory of Ann Jones)

After the Funeral (In memory of Ann Jones)

After the funeral, mule praises, brays,

Windshake of sailshaped ears, muffle-toed tap

Tap happily of one peg in the thick

Grave's foot, blinds down the lids, the teeth in black,

The spittled eyes, the salt ponds in the sleeves,

Morning smack of the spade that wakes up sleep,

Shakes a desolate boy who slits his throat

In the dark of the coffin and sheds dry leaves,

That breaks one bone to light with a judgment clout'

After the feast of tear-stuffed time and thistles

In a room with a stuffed fox and a stale fern,

I stand, for this memorial's sake, alone

In the snivelling hours with dead, humped Ann

Whose hodded, fountain heart once fell in puddles

Round the parched worlds of Wales and drowned each sun

(Though this for her is a monstrous image blindly

Magnified out of praise; her death was a still drop;

She would not have me sinking in the holy

Flood of her heart's fame; she would lie dumb and deep

And need no druid of her broken body).

But I, Ann's bard on a raised hearth, call all

The seas to service that her wood-tongud virtue

Babble like a bellbuoy over the hymning heads,

Bow down the walls of the ferned and foxy woods

That her love sing and swing through a brown chapel,

Blees her bent spirit with four, crossing birds.

Her flesh was meek as milk, but this skyward statue

With the wild breast and blessed and giant skull

Is carved from her in a room with a wet window

In a fiercely mourning house in a crooked year.

I know her scrubbed and sour humble hands

Lie with religion in their cramp, her threadbare

Whisper in a damp word, her wits drilled hollow,

Her fist of a face died clenched on a round pain;

And sculptured Ann is seventy years of stone.

These cloud-sopped, marble hands, this monumental

Argument of the hewn voice, gesture and psalm

Storm me forever over her grave until

The stuffed lung of the fox twitch and cry Love

And the strutting fern lay seeds on the black sill. 1938/ 1939