Find meat on bones

Dylan Thomas's Find meat on bones

Dylan Thomas's poem "Find meat on bones that soon have none" represents a compelling example of the Welsh poet's distinctive style and thematic preoccupations. Composed during his period of literary maturity, the poem encapsulates Thomas's characteristic concerns with mortality, sensuality, rebellion, and the complex interplay between natural forces and human experience. This analysis explores the poem's multifaceted dimensions, examining its formal qualities, symbolic landscape, philosophical implications, and position within Thomas's broader body of work and the modernist literary movement.

Thomas (1914-1953) stands as one of the twentieth century's most distinctive poetic voices, known for his sonorous verse, dense imagery, and exploration of primal human experiences. "Find meat on bones that soon have none" exemplifies Thomas's stylistic uniqueness while engaging with universal questions of mortality and meaning. The poem's structure—a series of stanzas that alternate between imperative exhortations and reflective observations—creates a dialectical tension that drives the work forward with urgency and philosophical depth.

Structural and Formal Elements

The poem's structure contributes significantly to its meaning and emotional impact. Comprising six stanzas of varying lengths (mostly eight lines, with some variation), the poem establishes a pattern of alternating voices—one instructive and commanding, one meditative and confessional. This dialogic structure creates a sense of internal debate or conversation, suggesting competing impulses within human consciousness or perhaps representing different temporal perspectives (youth versus age, innocence versus experience).

Thomas's characteristic sonic richness is evident throughout the work. The poem demonstrates his masterful use of assonance, consonance, and internal rhyme, creating a musical texture that reinforces the poem's emotional resonance. Consider the sonorous quality of "The merriest marrow and the dregs" where the repetition of 'm' sounds coupled with the long vowels creates a melodic flow that Thomas is renowned for. Similarly, the harsh consonants in phrases like "cracked across" create moments of sonic disruption that parallel the poem's thematic tensions.

The poem's syntax is characteristically Thomasian—complex, at times deliberately disorienting, with a preponderance of imperatives in the instructional stanzas contrasted with declarative statements in the reflective ones. This syntactical patterning reinforces the poem's thematic duality between action and contemplation, urgency and resignation.

Thematic Analysis: Carpe Diem and Mortality

The opening stanza establishes one of the poem's central themes: the urgent necessity to experience life's pleasures before the inevitable decay of aging and death. The command to "Find meat on bones that soon have none" presents a carpe diem motif filtered through Thomas's characteristically visceral imagery. This urgency is reinforced by references to consuming both "The merriest marrow and the dregs," suggesting a totality of experience that embraces both the exquisite and the base.

The memento mori tradition resonates throughout the poem, particularly in images like "when the ladies are cold as stone" that remind readers of mortality's certainty. Thomas, however, transforms this traditional meditation on death into something more complex—not merely a reminder to seize the day, but an exploration of how awareness of mortality can inform a more authentic engagement with life's contradictions and inevitabilities.

The recurring motif of the "ram rose" presents an intriguing symbolic fusion. The ram suggests masculine virility and perhaps sacrificial themes (recalling the ram caught in the thicket in the biblical Abraham narrative), while the rose traditionally symbolizes both love and its transience. This composite image appears at pivotal moments in the poem, suggesting a ritual marking of transitions between states of being—from youth to age, innocence to experience, life to death.

Rebellion Against Natural and Cosmic Orders

The second stanza introduces another crucial theme: rebellion against the natural order. The exhortation to "Rebel against the binding moon / And the parliament of sky" posits a defiance against cosmic forces that traditionally symbolize authority and inevitability. Thomas employs political metaphors ("parliament," "kingcrafts," "Autocracy," "Dictatorship") to characterize natural phenomena, suggesting that the cycles of nature represent a form of tyranny against which the human spirit must rebel.

This rebellion extends beyond celestial bodies to include the human body itself in the command to "Rebel against the flesh and bone, / The word of the blood, the wily skin." This introduces a paradoxical dimension to the poem's philosophy—humans must simultaneously embrace bodily experience (as in the first stanza's carpe diem motif) while also transcending or resisting bodily limitations and mortality. The "maggot no man can slay" becomes a multivalent symbol representing both the inevitability of decay and, potentially, the inextinguishable spark of life or creativity that persists despite mortality.

The Sexual and the Spiritual

Sexual themes permeate the poem, particularly in the third stanza's confession of a romantic or sexual encounter: "A merry girl took me for man, / I laid her down and told her sin." The language here is ambiguous—is the speaker confessing to seducing the girl, or merely informing her of the concept of sin? This ambiguity reflects Thomas's tendency to explore the sometimes uneasy relationship between sexuality and religious or moral frameworks.

The description of physical decline—"my heart is cracked across; / My face is haggard in the glass, / My lips are withered with a kiss, / My breasts are thin"—suggests that sensual experience, while vital, extracts a cost. This creates tension with the poem's earlier carpe diem ethos, complicating the poem's philosophy by acknowledging that embracing life's pleasures does not exempt one from suffering their consequences.

The sexual imagery intertwines with spiritual or religious motifs throughout the poem. References to "sin," confession, and the mysterious "ram rose" ritual create a syncretic symbolic landscape where the erotic and the sacred intermingle. This reflects Thomas's complex relationship with his religious heritage—raised in a Welsh Protestant tradition but developing an unorthodox spirituality that often found the divine within natural processes and bodily experiences rather than in traditional religious frameworks.

Paternal Authority and Psychological Rebellion

The fourth stanza introduces a specifically paternal dimension to the poem's exploration of authority and rebellion: "Rebel against my father's dream / That out of a bower of red swine / Howls the foul fiend to heel." This passage invites both biographical and psychoanalytic readings. Biographically, Thomas had a complex relationship with his father, an English literature teacher who encouraged his son's poetic development while reportedly maintaining strict discipline in the household.

From a psychoanalytic perspective, the rejection of the father's dream could represent the necessary psychological rebellion of the maturing individual against parental authority and inherited belief systems. The imagery of "a bower of red swine" from which "Howls the foul fiend" suggests a conception of sexuality as sinful and bestial—a conception the speaker explicitly rejects in the declaration "I cannot murder, like a fool, / Season and sunshine, grace and girl."

Resolution and Cosmic Reconciliation

The poem's final stanzas move toward a complex resolution of its central tensions. The fifth stanza presents a shift in perspective, acknowledging that "Black night still ministers the moon, / And the sky lays down her laws" despite the earlier calls for rebellion. More significantly, it recognizes that "Light and dark are no enemies / But one companion." This represents a philosophical maturation beyond simple rebellion, acknowledging that apparent opposites are often complementary aspects of a single reality.

This reconciliatory perspective is immediately challenged, however, by the final stanza's renewed call for cosmic rebellion: "War on the spider and the wren! / War on the destiny of man! / Doom on the sun!" These hyperbolic declarations read almost as a parody of the earlier, more serious calls for rebellion, suggesting perhaps that such absolute defiance is ultimately futile or misguided.

The poem's final line—"Before death takes you, O take back this"—introduces a crucial ambiguity. What is "this" that must be taken back? Is it the entire philosophy of rebellion articulated throughout the poem? Is it life itself that must be reclaimed and embraced before death? Or is it something more specific to the poem's narrative context? This deliberate ambiguity leaves readers with an interpretive space that resists closure, reflecting Thomas's preference for poetry that preserves mystery rather than reducing complex human experiences to simple moral lessons.

Historical and Literary Context

Composed during a period when modernism was giving way to various post-war literary movements, "Find meat on bones that soon have none" demonstrates Thomas's distinctive position in mid-twentieth-century poetry. While modernist poets like T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound often emphasized intellectual complexity and cultural fragmentation, Thomas's work maintained a romantic emphasis on emotional intensity and natural imagery, albeit filtered through modernist techniques like fragmented perspectives and complex symbolism.

The poem's composition coincided with a period of significant personal and historical turmoil. Though the exact date of composition is not specified in the given information, it likely belongs to Thomas's middle or late period, when he was grappling with financial difficulties, complicated personal relationships, and the broader cultural anxieties of the post-war era. The poem's preoccupation with mortality and urgent experience reflects both personal and collective concerns about meaning and authenticity in a world where traditional certainties had been profoundly shaken.

Thomas's Welsh heritage also informs the poem's sensibility. The musicality of Welsh poetic traditions, with their emphasis on sonorous language and emotional directness, influenced Thomas's distinctive style. Similarly, the poem's engagement with religious imagery reflects the complex religious landscape of Wales, where Protestant Christianity existed alongside older Celtic traditions and an increasing secular modernity.

Comparative Perspectives

Thomas's approach to mortality and urgent experience in this poem bears interesting comparison with other poetic traditions addressing similar themes. Unlike the elegant restraint of classical carpe diem poetry as exemplified by Horace or Marvell's "To His Coy Mistress," Thomas's treatment is rawer, more visceral, embracing the body's messiness and decay rather than merely using mortality as a seduction technique.

Similarly, while Thomas shares the Romantic poets' interest in rebellion against constraining orders, his vision differs significantly from theirs. Where Blake's rebellion against authority envisioned transcendent liberation, and Shelley's political rebellion imagined social transformation, Thomas's rebellion seems more existential and personal—less about changing social structures than about authentically confronting the human condition.

Thomas's contemporaries in the New Apocalypse movement (including Henry Treece and J.F. Hendry) shared his interest in myth, emotion, and the irrational, positioning their work against what they perceived as the excessive rationalism of earlier modernism. "Find meat on bones that soon have none" exemplifies this tendency, privileging emotional urgency and symbolic resonance over logical coherence.

The Poem's Philosophical Dimensions

Beyond its literary qualities, "Find meat on bones that soon have none" engages with profound philosophical questions. The poem's exploration of rebellion against cosmic and natural orders resonates with existentialist philosophy, particularly Albert Camus's concept of the absurd hero who persists in giving meaning to life despite the universe's indifference. Thomas's speaker, like Camus's Sisyphus, seems to find dignity in defiance, even when that defiance cannot change fundamental realities.

The poem also engages with philosophical questions about time and human experience. The contrast between the urgent commands of the present ("Find meat on bones") and the reflective voice that speaks from a position of experience suggests different temporal perspectives on human life. This creates a complex dialectic between living in the moment and reflecting on life from a broader temporal perspective—between what German philosophy might distinguish as erlebnis (immediate lived experience) and erfahrung (the wisdom of accumulated experience).

The poem's treatment of physical decay and mortality also invites comparison with philosophical traditions that emphasize the body as the site of authentic human experience. Unlike Platonic traditions that devalue the physical in favor of the ideal, Thomas's poem, despite acknowledging physical deterioration, locates meaning precisely in embodied experience—"meat," "marrow," "flesh and bone."

Conclusion

Dylan Thomas's "Find meat on bones that soon have none" represents a profound poetic engagement with mortality, rebellion, and the quest for authentic experience. Through its distinctive formal qualities, rich symbolism, and philosophical complexity, the poem exemplifies Thomas's unique contribution to twentieth-century poetry. It navigates a fine line between despair and affirmation, between the recognition of inevitable decay and the passionate embrace of life's intensities.

The poem's enduring power lies partly in its refusal to offer simple answers. The final ambiguous command—"Before death takes you, O take back this"—leaves readers with a charge that demands personal interpretation. This interpretive openness, combined with the poem's sonic richness and emotional intensity, ensures that each encounter with the poem becomes an opportunity for readers to confront their own relationship with mortality and meaning.

Thomas's achievement in this poem is to transform the universal human awareness of death from a paralyzing fear into a catalyst for more authentic living. By articulating both the urgency of carpe diem and the limitations of simple rebellion, the poem offers a nuanced vision of human existence that acknowledges both our cosmic insignificance and the profound importance of how we choose to live within our temporal limitations. In this sense, "Find meat on bones that soon have none" exemplifies poetry's capacity not merely to comfort or entertain, but to challenge readers toward deeper engagement with life's fundamental questions.