A study of the images of the womb and the tomb in Dylan Thomas's poetry

Abstract EN

This paper explores and discusses, as the title suggests, the Images of womb and tomb in Dylan Thomas’s poetry.

The Welsh poet Dylan Thomas is one of the greatest poets of the twentieth century.

His poetry reveals a remarkable interest in the two concepts of the womb and the tomb.

These two images dominate all through the poet’s oeuvre.

Clustered around these two central images are many other ones.

While images such as water, blood, the wind and seeds come to cluster around images of the womb, images of worms and maggots cluster around those of the tomb.

Thomas’s early poetry was characterised by submissiveness and surrendering to death; this accounts for images of the tomb, as symbolising death, coming to the foreground in such early poems while those of the womb (life) retreat to the background.

Later, however, the images of the womb came to the foreground with those of the tomb retreating to the background.

The eternal struggle between life (womb) and death (tomb) is interestingly depicted through a gamut of images extending all through Thomas’s poetry.

These started with surrendering and submissiveness to the defeating power of the tomb and the forces of death, and went through different phases of development ending up with an acceptance of death as one of the phases necessary in the evolutionary, transformational process (cycle) of life.

After their death, the life of human beings continues, but they themselves take another metamorphic shape.

We come to see the tomb as a step in the process of the continuation of life; and here lies the greatest paradox in Thomas’s poetry.