All That I Owe the Fellows of the Grave

A young man’s meditation on mortality, Dylan Thomas’s “All That I Owe the Fellows of the Grave” is a brash stare-down with death itself. The poem is a reminder that, yes, we are flesh and blood, and yes, we approach the inevitable catastrophe of death—but until then it is our luck to live fully, generously, boldly.

Written in the summer of 1933, early in Thomas’s career (he was not yet 20), the poem reflects Thomas’s sympathies with the classic Romantic vision—its impulse toward nature, its mystical elevation of the poetic imagination, and its childlike sense of wonder and spontaneity; Thomas disdained the fretful poetry of political and social activism that defined so much of his era. The poem reflects Thomas’s love of striking language, which he learned from poring over the master texts of the Modernists, chiefly the novels of James Joyce. The poem rewards dramatic recitation, given the poet’s intuitive sense of idiosyncratic rhythm and melody.

Poet Biography

Dylan Marlais Thomas was born October 27, 1914 in Swansea, a teeming port city along the southern coast of Wales. Although too much of a born anarchist to respond to the authoritarianism of public education (he dropped out of school when he was 16), Thomas, a sickly child often bedridden with asthma, grew up listening to his father’s dramatical poetry recitation.