Elegy ~ Dylan Thomas

Too proud to die; broken and blind he
died
The darkest way, and did not turn
away,
A cold kind man brave in his narrow
pride

On that darkest day, Oh, forever may
He lie lightly, at last on the last,
crossed
Hill, under the grass, in love, and there
grow

Young among the long flocks, and
never lie lost
Or still all the numberless days of his
death, though
Above all he longed for his mother's
breast

Which was rest and dust, and in the
kind ground
The darkest justice of death, blind and
unblessed.
Let him find no rest but be fathered
and found,
I prayed in the crouching room, by his
blind bed,
In the muted house, one minute before
Noon, and night, and light. the rivers of
the dead

Veined his poor hand I held, and I saw
Through his unseeing eyes to the
roots of the sea.
(An old tormented man three-quarters
blind,

I am not too proud to cry that He and
he
Will never never go out of my mind.
All his bones crying, and poor in all but pain,

Being innocent, he dreaded that he
died
Hating his God, but what he was was
plain:
An old kind man brave in his burning
pride.

The sticks of the house were his; his
books he owned.
Even as a baby he had never cried;
Nor did he now, save to his secret
wound.

Out of his eyes I saw the last light
glide.
Here among the liught of the lording
sky
An old man is with me where I go

Walking in the meadows of his son's
eye
On whom a world of ills came down
like snow.
He cried as he died, fearing at last the
spheres'

Last sound, the world going out
without a breath:
Too proud to cry, too frail to check the
tears,
And caught between two nights,
blindness and death.

O deepest wound of all that he should
die
On that darkest day. oh, he could hide
The tears out of his eyes, too proud to
cry.

Until I die he will not leave my side.)