All That I Owe the Fellows of the Grave

Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 1933

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Summary

Poem Analysis

Background

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Literary Devices

Symbols & Motifs

The Grave

Ironically, “All That I Owe” uses the stark reality of the grave, the “pale estates” (Line 2), to make vivid and immediate the imperative of life. Among Thomas’s wide range of favored poetic influences were the brooding churchyard meditations on death that became something of a fad in pre-Romantic British poetry. These poems, most notably Thomas Gray’s “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard,” indulged shadowy gothic atmospherics to vent hyperbolic angst over life’s pointlessness; everyone, great and small, inevitably ends up forgotten and moldering in some leaf-strewn churchyard.

It is exactly that moribund claustrophobia that Thomas’s poem upends. The speaker understands the reality of death; he understands the seemingly powerful flesh inevitably fails; he understands the “postures of the dead” (Line 22). He cannot, however, indulge an elegy. Still, in the closing stanza, he shifts the argument dramatically and asks that life “rightsighted from the grave” (Line 24) reveals its promise. Rather than despair, the grave here insists on hope. As a symbol, the grave alone promises the possibility of living. The speaker reassures himself to be grateful for life’s finitude, for that finitude bears life’s riches.

The Heart

Although his audacious manipulations of rhythm mark him as a Modernist, Thomas was by temperament a Romantic. His poetry is emotionally charged in its understanding of the heart’s imperatives. This poem is centered on the heart, here symbolizing the wealth of the senses and the body’s grasping energy. The poem is the swaggering cri de coeur of youth eager for the drama of complex and inevitably messy passion.

The poem, however, is grounded in the real. The heart is no trite cliché; it is that bloody organ in the chest, imperfect and doomed to ending. It is a “flask of blood” (Line 3); its blood coursing through the body, a hot “senna” that brings the body to life like water to “ravaged roots” (Line 4); it is “scalding” (Line 9) in the veins as it carries the heat of passion; and it is ultimately a “scarlet trove,” a priceless treasure within the body. The heart, according to the poem, is what unites all human generations. Each person’s inheritance, the heart’s complicated hunger animates life and elevates the human experience to the divine-enough.

The Winding Sheet

The winding sheet symbolizes both death and the death-bound body. Reflecting perhaps Thomas’s childhood in rural Wales, where the tradition was still practiced well into the twentieth century, the winding sheet is a kind of inexpensive shroud used for burial ceremonies that eliminated the need for poorer families to dress a corpse and then lose those clothes to the grave. The stripped corpse would be wrapped in the sheet and then the wrap itself would be secured, sealed with hot candle wax along the seam.

In the closing stanza, the speaker chides himself for allowing bodily reality to ever limit the fullest experience of the moment. He describes himself as wandering among the dead too soon, too ready to take his place among the “postures of the dead” (Line 22). Carving out the poem’s central paradox of life-through-death, the speaker compares the human body itself to such a shroud: “All night and day I wander in the same / Wax clothes that wax upon the ageing ribs” (Lines 25-26). However, he admonishes himself not to live as if already prepared for the grave while his “fortune slumbers” (Line 26) in that sheet. He reminds himself that he is like living wheat still on the stalk. The metaphors underscore the speaker’s refusal to abdicate the fullness of being before he is actually outfitted for a shroud.