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‘down in the terraces between the targets’ 

consolation’.^54 Onlythrough the possible implications of the words ‘smoke’ and
‘ruin’ does the poem, as anthologized, link itself to the Blitz. ‘That world which was
ours is a world that is ours no more,’ the poet writes at the end of his third verse,
and then adds:

They will come again, the leaf and the flower, to arise

From squalor of rottenness into the old splendour,

And magical scents to a wondering memory bring;

The same glory, to shine upon different eyes.

Earth cares for her own ruins, naught for ours.

Nothing is certain, only the certain spring.^55

Here too, ‘one of the major lyrics of the home front’^56 gains a general applicability to
human catastrophes and the passage of time, at the expense of being able to address
its specific occasion in the experience’s terms—and all but states as much in its
penultimate line. Without Kenneth Allott’s remarking that it is ‘in a restricted sense’
about the bombing of London, a reader is unlikely to understand it as so restricted.
Dylan Thomas’s three bombing poems essay different approaches to using nat-
ural imagery for art prompted by mechanized warfare. ‘Among Those Killed in the
Dawn Raid was a Man Aged a Hundred’ signals the thematic point with its title.
The text then takes the circumstance as an occasion to contrast ideas of natural and
unnatural deaths: ‘O keep his bones away from that common cart,|The morning
is flying on the wings of his age.’^57 ‘Ceremony after a Fire Raid’ is an elaborated
response that attempts to set the poet’s techniques at full stretch (‘A child of a few
hours|With its kneaded mouth|Charred on the black breast’^58 )fortheenormityof
his subject, in a manner comparable to Louis MacNiece’s ‘The Trolls’ (‘a last|Shake
of the fist at the vanishing sky, at the hulking|Halfwit demons who rape and
slobber’,^59 ) or his ‘Brother Fire’ with its calculatedly complicit close:

Did we not on those mornings after the All Clear,

When you were looting shops in elemental joy

And singing as you swarmed up city block and spire,

Echo your thoughts in ours? ‘Destroy! Destroy!’^60

The best of Thomas’s three, and one of the most memorable poems about an air
raid casualty, ‘A Refusal to Mourn the Death, by Fire, of a Child in London’, appears

(^54) Logan Pearsall Smith, quoted in John Hatcher,Laurence Binyon: Poet, Scholar of East and West
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), 289.
(^55) For the full text, see Laurence Binyon, ‘The Burning of the Leaves: Five Poems’, inThe Burning
of the Leaves and Other Poems(London: Macmillan, 1944), 1–6.
(^56) Hatcher,Laurence Binyon, 90.
(^57) DylanThomas,‘AmongThoseKilledintheDawnRaidwasaManAgedaHundred’,inCollected
Poems 1934–1952(London: Dent, 1952), 127.
(^58) Thomas, ‘Ceremony after a Fire Raid’, ibid. 121–3.
(^59) Louis MacNeice, ‘The Trolls’, inThe Collected Poems of Louis MacNeice,ed.PeterMcDonald
(London: Faber, 2007), 219. 60
MacNeice, ‘Brother Fire’, ibid. 217.