Poets often use their commanding ability of the English language to illustrate many subtleties of life and nature. “The Force That Through the Green Fuse that Drives the Flower” by Dylan Thomas is a powerful poem that uses imagery of nature to explain its central theme: life is a process that continuously cycles, from birth to death, and back again.
Thomas uses rich imagery and comparisons to bring across the idea that life is a cyclic process. In the first stanza, the passage “The force that through the green fuse drives the flower/Drives my green age; that blasts the roots of trees/Is my destroyer.”(Thomas, lines 1-3) argues that the same force that aids the growth of organisms is also the force that brings about their destruction. Hence, from the moment of birth, the forces of nature (of which time is part of) guide us towards maturity, and finally death. The same basic argument is also present in the first three lines of the second stanza. In addition, the overall imagery of the second stanza contains heavy allusion to the cyclic nature of life in the description of water and ‘mouthing streams’. The mouth of a stream is where it joins a larger body of water such as a river; eventually, the river empties into an even larger body of water such as a lake or ocean; then, the water there will make its way back into rivers, and finally streams. Therefore, just as the flow of life giving water is cyclic, so is life.
As the poem continues to the third stanza, the imagery becomes darker and more focused on the destructive forces of nature, which act to create ‘whirlpools’ and ‘quicksand’. However, the meaning of the first few lines is less clear than those in the previous stanzas. The next couple of lines continues the tone of the third stanza by saying that after death (perhaps by hanging), the corps will return as clay to the Earth, from which flowers and trees grow out of, giving yet another argument on how life is a cycle. The fourth stanza revisits the notion of birth, or resurrection, although in a cruder tone. “The lip of time leech to the fountain head;/ Love drips and gathers, but the fallen blood/ shall calm her sores.”(Thomas, lines 16-7) These lines can be interpreted as the physical nature of the relationship between men and women giving rise to a new generation (Themes). Since very early in history, children have been viewed as a continuation of their parents, so that families live on in their children, even after death.
As the poem’s main theme is the cyclic nature of life, this poem it self can also be viewed as a cycle. In its final two lines, “And I am dumb to tell the lover’s tomb/How at my sheet goes the same crooked worm.”(Thomas, lines 21-2) reminds the reader of the “crooked rose” in the first stanza, and brings to mind the growth of the flower at the beginning of the poem. Thus the poem comes full circle, beginning with birth and development, then death, then back to birth. The unique format and arrangement of the poem thoroughly applies the central theme of the poem; that life is a process that cycles continuously.
Work Cited
“Notes on Poetry: The Force That Through the Green Fuse Drives the Flower (Themes).” Ask.Com. 24 May 2008 <http://www.answers.com/topic/the-force-that-through-the-green-fuse-drives-the-flower-poem-2>.
Thomas, Dylan. “The Force That Through the Green Fuse Drives the Flower.” The Longman Anthology: British Literature. Ed. David Damrosch, et al. United States: Pearson Education, Inc., 2004. Vol. B: 1372-73
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