May the Force Be with You

Dylan Thomas' "The Force That through the Green Fuse Drives the Flower" is, in my estimation, a poem about the paradox regarding the inextricability of life and death.

The poem begins: "The force that through the green fuse drives the flower / Drives my green age." These two lines convey the irony that life's natural destination is death. The same essence or "force" that can be called life is what has thrust the speaker toward death, like an arc-shot from the cannon of birth, forever aimed at the target of death. The speaker goes on to express that he is "dumb to tell the crooked rose / My youth is bent by the same wintry fever." I see this as a declaration that time affects all living things. As the winter season may "bend" the rose, so the winter of old-age makes "crooked" men, hunched over with a cane.

The next two stanzas follow this pattern, but become slightly less clear. From stanza two: "The force that drives the water through the rocks / Drives my red blood; that dries the mouthing streams / Turns mine to wax." Again, I see this as a statement on the unity of all living things under this paradox of life and death. The "force" that causes streams to flow is the same force that causes them to dry up is the same force that causes the speaker's blood to flow and causes his veins and mouth to dry up. The stanza concludes: "And I am dumb to mouth unto my veins / How at the same mountain spring the same mouth sucks." Stanza three follows suit, explicating the relationships between the speaker's body, "my clay," and "the hangman's lime" (which was used when burying criminals to increase the decomposition of the body, from which the earth would then receive nutrition and create more lime).

Stanzas four and five break the pattern slightly:

The lips of time leech to the fountain head;
Love drips and gathers, but the fallen blood
Shall calm her sores.
And I am dumb to tell a weather's wind
How time has ticked a heaven round the stars.

And I am dumb to to tell the lover's tomb
How at my sheet goes the same crooked worm.

This is probably the hardest part to explicate. On the one hand, it is obvious that, again, these conclusions reveal the interconnectivity of life and death, as well as the interconnectivity of all living things beneath that umbrella. On the other hand, I almost see a sort of refutation of religion and the afterlife in the last four lines of stanza four, but the metaphors seem a little too ambiguous for me to extrapolate anything specifically, other than I feel the speaker claiming that God and the afterlife are a human construction developed over time, time which has "ticked a heaven round the stars."

Love, which "Drips and gathers," he seems to say cannot be eternal. For, despite "the lover's tomb," "the same crooked worm" eats at all rot, indifferent to love.