And Shall Death Indeed Have No Dominion?

Dylan Thomas has always haunted my imagination as the quintessential poet. His wonder at the weight of words, his prophetic pronouncements and paradoxes, his mystical bardic vision, his sonorous voice-- each are subtle shades of light shifting in the aura that surrounds this legendary Welsh poet. Even the sad trajectory of his later life lends a kind of glimmer and shadow to his verse. He once said of himself, "I hold a beast, an angel, and a madman in me, and my inquiry is as to their working, and my problem is their subjugation and victory, down throw and upheaval, and my effort is their self-expression." The quintessential poet.

If you've never yet encountered the poetry of Dylan Thomas, I'd invite you to listen for the "bardic vision" in a poem like "And Death Shall Have No Dominion."

[click here to listen]

So I've been thinking about Dylan Thomas quite a bit lately; mostly because I'm tempted these days to mourn the death of the word in the Evangelical pulpit. Please understand: this is not some typical modernist, "We've stopped preaching the Word," kind of rant-- I'm not simply lamenting the death of "Biblical Absolutes"-- And I'm not waxing nostalgic for the good-ol'- "Thus Sayeth the Lord"-days. What I'm talking about here is the absence of poetically poignant words in our preaching. The laden images and compelling music and evocative ambiguities of the poetic word seem to have no place next to the clinical, linear, utilitarian three-pointer that is the modern sermon. Somewhere we seem to have lost the conviction that the spoken word-- the poetic word-- not only communicates Truth but actually particpiates in it in a powerful way. As someone once put it: "the content is all there, but we might as well be giving the weather report."

And my heart often aches over what we might call a dominion of dead words in the pulpit.

And when it does, I think of Dylan Thomas. He once said that a primary influence in his poetry was "the great biblical rhythms that had rolled over him from the Welsh pulpits of his youth." I've referred to the Welsh tradition of powerful "pulpit oratory" elsewhere, but here's the thing: by his own admission, the "headlong rhetoric," the "powerful imaginative strength," and the "mystical, religious vision," that he heard sounding from the Welsh pulpit as a child taught Dylan Thomas the bardic rhythms and word-wonder of the poet.

The pulpit once taught the poet about the weight of the spoken word.

And I wonder sometimes if the pulpit must now ask the poet to return the favor.