18 pages • 36 minutes read
All That I Owe the Fellows of the Grave
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Themes
The Oneness of Humanity
Despite death’s grim reality, “All That I Owe” navigates the reader toward a resilience and a transcendent sense of shared humanity. The poet was sounding this optimistic sense of universal oneness at the very time Europe split into warring factions and girded up for catastrophe. Unlike poets drawn to the idea that some radiant soul animates the material universe, Thomas resists such a supernatural overlay and instead invests his faith in the body’s coaxing “itches” (Line 15); the pulsing heart that sends the blood through the veins like “senna stirs along the ravaged roots” (Line 4); and the sturdy architecture of the bones. That shared corporeality binds all generations—that is the heritage, the fortune. Do not forget, the poem’s speaker counsels himself, the “scarlet trove” (Line 28) of the heart and how that treasure binds each and all. He recognizes these others as his family, his fathers, his sisters, his brothers. He is the sun, they are his sky.
The Power of Flesh and Blood
The speaker wholly embraces incarnate reality, responding passionately to the “telling senses” (Line 15). As though anticipating the popular misconceptions of his poetry as bawdy or even obscene, Thomas refuses to soften his exaltation of the flesh through euphemism or cagey symbol. The poem is steeped in blood by the flask that rushes through senna-colored veins. The speaker imagines casting his eye upon his own skull, his “bonehead fortune” (Line 21); his flesh tingles with the immemorial carnal itches. Every impulse he indulges acknowledges his debt to his forebears—a rich communion bound and elevated by the flesh and blood.
The speaker’s closing caution to himself, to remember he is yet alive, bears temperance. Although the poem celebrates bodily yearnings, the poem is not a simple ode to hedonism. The concept of fleshly indulgence is only half the poem’s essence. Death hangs about the poem’s symbolic environment. It begins in an address to the “fellows of the grave” (Line 1). In Stanza 2, the speaker links himself to generations of children felled by the plague, acknowledging somatic affliction. In the closing stanza, he warns himself to never forget the “postures of the dead” (Line 22)—but to celebrate despite that awareness. Embrace flesh and blood exactly because they are not infallible; a complex gift, but therein rests a genuine power.
Carpe Diem
Carpe Diem—Latin for “seize the day”—is a traditional literary theme dating to antiquity in which a writer exhorts the reader to live in the moment. In the closing stanza, the speaker admonishes himself to never forget the imperative of death but to let that awareness ignite a determination to live as though he is truly alive, engaging the world’s overflowing energy. In chorus, it is a caution against despair.
Reflecting perhaps Thomas’s own long history of illness and his temptation to relieve life’s burdens (most notably penury) through the simple escape of alcohol, the speaker of Thomas’s poem tells himself not to live like the chaff abandoned on the mill floor, as if he has little life left. He cautions himself not to wander blindly through life, allowing his “fortune” (Line 27)—that is the wealth of his physicality—to slumber, to go wasted or even deemed unneeded.
The poem is thus a youthful variation of the iconic “Do Not Go Gentle into that Good Night,” a signature poem Thomas would complete nearly 20 years later, urging his own aging father against surrender to death without an earnest fight. In “All That I Owe,” the poem suggests how easy it is to forget life, to lose a sense of wonder—or worse, to live with the naiveté of a perpetual child ignorant of death. The closing three lines suggest that the speaker might be too persuaded by mortality’s anxiety (Thomas himself was a sickly child and forever aware of his weak lungs). The poem closes with that exhortation—the emphatically repeated command to “look” (Lines 28-29) upon the heart’s great treasure, the gift of the moment.
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By Dylan Thomas
