Under Milk Wood Essay - 3 Relationships
‘The Force that Through the Green Fuse Drives the Flower’ Essay: 400-450 words
By Maxwell Hardy
There are an awful lot of hidden messages in Dylan Thomas’s poem ‘The Force that Through the Green Fuse Dives the Flower,’ but only if you go looking for them. Probably the two most prominent themes are the relationship between Life and Death, as well as Thomas’s perception of what ‘drives’ them; a divine, natural power that manipulates it. The poem is mostly written in the first-person, describing Thomas’s reaction to the things that he discovers and his disbelief as he tries to come to terms with it.
Thomas maintains a strong emphasis on life and death throughout the poem. He draws a strong correlation between the two in the very beginning of the poem by likening them to explosives. The stem of a blooming, blossoming flower is the fuse, gradually getting smaller and smaller, until the spark reaches the bottom and ignites the explosive, ‘blasting the roots of trees,’ killing us off when we mature and come of age. Again this connection is strengthened when he claims the very stuff we are made of, ‘clay,’ is also used to make the ‘hangman’s lime,’ the material hangmen and undertakers use to cover bodies when they decay. By repeating this concept over and over in each stanza Thomas sets the foundation for his poem and moulds everything else around it, making the poem’s objective clear and firmly planting what he wants to convey to the reader in their memory.
A key theme in Thomas’s poem is the presence of a divine, almost god-like entity, which creates, maintains, and has dominion over life. It is the vigorous ‘force that drives’ life forward ‘through the rocks.’ We get a sense of its domination over time as well when it ‘whirls the water’ and ‘stirs the quicksand.’ The clever wordplay on quick-sand conjures the thought of sand and its twirling motion presents us with the image of an hourglass, a medieval instrument used for measuring time. And the revolving, circular
By Maxwell Hardy
There are an awful lot of hidden messages in Dylan Thomas’s poem ‘The Force that Through the Green Fuse Dives the Flower,’ but only if you go looking for them. Probably the two most prominent themes are the relationship between Life and Death, as well as Thomas’s perception of what ‘drives’ them; a divine, natural power that manipulates it. The poem is mostly written in the first-person, describing Thomas’s reaction to the things that he discovers and his disbelief as he tries to come to terms with it.
Thomas maintains a strong emphasis on life and death throughout the poem. He draws a strong correlation between the two in the very beginning of the poem by likening them to explosives. The stem of a blooming, blossoming flower is the fuse, gradually getting smaller and smaller, until the spark reaches the bottom and ignites the explosive, ‘blasting the roots of trees,’ killing us off when we mature and come of age. Again this connection is strengthened when he claims the very stuff we are made of, ‘clay,’ is also used to make the ‘hangman’s lime,’ the material hangmen and undertakers use to cover bodies when they decay. By repeating this concept over and over in each stanza Thomas sets the foundation for his poem and moulds everything else around it, making the poem’s objective clear and firmly planting what he wants to convey to the reader in their memory.
A key theme in Thomas’s poem is the presence of a divine, almost god-like entity, which creates, maintains, and has dominion over life. It is the vigorous ‘force that drives’ life forward ‘through the rocks.’ We get a sense of its domination over time as well when it ‘whirls the water’ and ‘stirs the quicksand.’ The clever wordplay on quick-sand conjures the thought of sand and its twirling motion presents us with the image of an hourglass, a medieval instrument used for measuring time. And the revolving, circular