"A Refusal to Mourn the Death, by Fire, of a Child in London” is a poem written by Dylan Thomas. The poem is a reaction to the horrors inflicted upon the British people by the fascist regime of Nazi Germany. At the behest of German supreme leader Adolf Hitler, soldiers and civilians alike were terrorized by a constant barrage of bombs dropped on London from Nazi planes. The title is an essential element in the analysis of this poem as it reveals its profound irony.
Outraged though the speaker is by the circumstances of the death of a young girl—who is the child mentioned prominently in the title—he proceeds to exert great effort trying to normalize those abominably unusual circumstances. The stimulation to refuse to mourn the girl's passing is an attempt to convince himself and his readers that it is no more tragic than any other death. The opening stanza is notable for its length and complexity, but in the end, it is just a simple message. Life (the universe) begins in darkness and in darkness shall it end. Death is characterized as the "all humbling darkness." In other words, death awaits and unites every living creature on the planet. For this reason, primarily, the speaker shall mourn the death of this child because existence is a cycle that always comes back around to non-existence.
The speaker goes on, however, to assert that "he shall not murder" the child a second time by writing an "elegy of innocence and youth." To paraphrase Shakespeare, the speaker doth protest too much. In referencing the child's death at the hands of soulless Nazis as worthy of glorification, the speaker even attempts to endow a heroic quality to the mechanism of her demise. At this point in the verse—the third stanza—the poem transforms into exactly what the speaker has declared it is not. The poem that asserts its refusal in the title becomes an epic elegiac expression of mourning and grief winds up becoming that very thing. Everything up to this point has really been nothing more than an ironic endeavor. The speaker tries to downplay the tragic implications of the child's death by adorning it with Christian imagery cementing the concept of an afterlife. This adornment is an effort to make death less significantly tragic than it seems. The ironic dimension of the title is manifested in the fact that the harder the poet tries to convince himself that the child's death is a natural part of the cycle of life, the less convincing that argument becomes.
