Two Rhetorics of Endurance

Dylan Thomas’s chant, “And death shall have no dominion,” and the Bhagavad-Gītā’s aphoristic teaching that the ātman is not slain by death occupy very different literary and historical worlds. Thomas’s line is a defiant appropriation of the Christian New Testament (Romans 6:9), repurposed for a secular, immanent vision of continuity. The Gıˉtaˉ’s doctrine is a cornerstone of Hindu metaphysics, embedded in a soteriological framework of duty and liberation. Yet both insist, with comparable moral force, that the annihilation of the body does not entail the annihilation of a person’s essential staying power. This essay stages the two texts beside one another to ask what consolation, ethical instruction, and metaphysical claim each supplies, and how their modes of convincing—poetic performance versus scriptural argument—shape what each text can do for a mourner, a warrior, or a skeptical reader.

Methodologically, the comparison is deliberately modest. This is not a claim that Thomas ‘borrowed’ Indian doctrine, nor that the Gītā is a lyric poem. Rather, the goal is analogical: to trace how two distinct authorities (a modern lyric that weaponizes liturgical voice and an ancient scripture embedded in soteriological practice) produce convergent human effects. Both offer a rhetoric of continuity in the face of bodily ruin, and both have practical consequences for how one lives under that conviction.

This analysis proceeds along two guiding vectors. First, it foregrounds sound and performance: the Gıˉtaˉ’s compact aphorisms function didactically but were meant to be heard in oral pedagogies; Thomas’s poem is designed to be spoken, its repeated line a liturgical fixture that enacts belief through breath. Second, it tracks how each text links claims about persistence to ethical consequence: detachment and duty in the Gītā; fidelity, love, and communal memory in Thomas. These two vectors—sound and praxis—will carry the close readings that follow.

Rhetorical Strategies: Sound, Image, and Authority

Both texts rely on condensed, memorable phrasing to secure belief, but they build their authority through different means. Where the Bhagavad-Gītā achieves authority doctrinally by insisting on a metaphysical premise that reshapes praxis, Dylan Thomas achieves it performatively, harnessing voice and image to make belief felt.

The Gītā appears within the Mahābhārata as a dialogue where Krishna instructs the warrior Arjuna, whose despair before a battle against his own kin is a crisis of love and attachment. The scripture’s authority is theological and pedagogical; its short, aphoristic formulas about the Self are easily memorized for oral instruction and are meant to orient conduct by way of metaphysical knowledge. Its pronouncements carry the legitimating weight of scripture, caste, and ritual. The claim that the ātman is unborn and undying is thus delivered as a didactic and schematic truth—an ontological axiom from which right action follows. The compactness of the verses yields cognitive certainty.

Dylan Thomas’s poem emerges from a very different ecology: a Welsh, chapel-sung idiom combined with raw coastal imagery. His authority is poetic, not scriptural, yet he appropriates the cadence and ritual weight of liturgy to grant his claims a sacred feel. The repeated injunction—“And death shall have no dominion”—operates as both thesis and performative chant. When spoken aloud, it does not merely describe a belief; it enacts a communal affirmation. Its power is felt in the body through breath and stress. Thomas’s sonic density, built on anaphora and emphatic rhythms, yields a felt certainty. Both texts convert hearing into assent, but one appeals to doctrinal reason while the other appeals to somatic experience.

This difference extends to their use of imagery. The Gītā abstracts persistence into metaphysical language: the Self endures beyond bodily mutation like a person changing worn-out garments. It is a conceptual anchor for action. Thomas, by contrast, insists on the body’s violent ruin to render persistence visible, and his engagement with his biblical source extends deeply into this imagery, creating a secular analogue to the Passion and Crucifixion of Christ. The Christian narrative posits that resurrection—the ultimate victory over death—is preceded by the ultimate physical torment. Likewise, Thomas’s poem earns its triumphant claim by first cataloging scenes of utter somatic ruin.

The imagery is that of a brutal martyrdom: bodies are "Twisting on racks when sinews give way" and "Strapped to a wheel." These are not gentle dissolutions into nature; they are torturous destructions that echo the agonies of the Cross. When Thomas writes that "the unicorn evils run them through," it’s hard not to see a parallel to the spear piercing Christ's side. The poem’s figures endure a state of being "mad and dead as nails," a phrase that powerfully evokes the nails of the Crucifixion itself. The endurance it celebrates is not a serene, untouched persistence like that of the ātman, which remains aloof from the body’s fate. Instead, Thomas’s vision of continuity is forged in the crucible of suffering. Just as Christ's dominion over death is meaningful only because He first suffered and died, the lovers' love is made powerful because it survives a graphic, cruciform violence. The poem thus presents a kind of secular Calvary, where the triumph is not divine resurrection but the relentless, earth-bound persistence of life hammering "through daisies." Thomas gives a sensuous, violent demonstration that compels emotion; the Gītā offers a conceptual account that orients duty.

Ontologies of Persistence: ātman and Poetic 'Soul'

At the heart of each text is a claim about what, precisely, endures. The Bhagavad-Gītā presents the Self (ātman) as an ontological constant: not born, not slain, indifferent to the body's transmutations. This assertion functions as a metaphysical axiom from which moral and soteriological consequences follow—knowledge of the Self grounds courage, detachment, and right action. The ātman is an impersonal, metaphysical permanence whose ultimate value is liberation (mokṣa).

Dylan Thomas does not offer a metaphysical system. Yet lines like “though lovers be lost, love shall not” and the stubborn recurrence of life amid decay gesture toward a kind of poetic ‘soul’—not an abstract substance but an affective persistence enacted in communal memory, speech, and ritual. Where the ātman is an individual, unassailable entity, Thomas’s enduring principle is relational: love, voice, and the body’s own cycles of decay and renewal carry continuity forward.

Read together, we can describe Thomas’s claim as a poetic analogue to the ātman. Both posit something that outlives the flesh, but they differ fundamentally in ontology. The Gītā’s permanence licenses detachment (the Self is not to be gripped by fear or desire), while Thomas’s permanence licenses attachment made resilient (one can mourn without collapse and keep fidelity despite loss). Both remedy the terror of annihilation, yet they do so by differently configuring what endures and why it matters.

Ethics and Praxis: Dispassionate Duty vs. Resilient Fidelity

The ultimate test of each text’s claim lies in the practical orientation it provides for living with death. The Gıˉtaˉ’s metaphysical assertion that the ātman is eternal directly informs an ethic of action. For Arjuna, paralyzed by grief over the impending death of his kinsmen, the knowledge of the immortal Self produces dispassion (vairaˉgya) and steadiness in action (karma−yoga). If the Self remains untouched, the warrior can perform his duty without attachment to outcomes. The praxis is one of inner renunciation to secure right action in the world.

Thomas’s poem supplies a different practical orientation. The ethical consequence of believing that love or a soul-like persistence survives bodily ruin is not detachment but intensified fidelity. If love “shall not” be lost, then mourning becomes a form of sustained allegiance rather than terminal despair. Social bonds are thickened by this conviction, not thinned. The poem’s praxis is therefore sacramental in the everyday: ritual speech, communal memory, and acts of care become the means of embodying the poem’s claim.

Where the Gītā trains an agent to perform duty without egoic clinging, Thomas trains a community to rehearse and embody the claim that relation survives, thereby converting loss into persistent ethical responsibility. Both temper the fear of death and release agency from the immobilizing terror of annihilation. Both enable moral risk—the warrior’s charge, the lover’s fidelity—but they orient that action toward different ends.

Complementary Languages of Consolation

A comparative reading risks decontextualization. The Gıˉtaˉ’s soteriology presupposes larger metaphysical frameworks (karma, rebirth, dharma) that Thomas does not share, while Thomas’s poetic claims lack the systematic scaffolding that gives the Gītā prescriptive force. A devotional reader of the Gītā and a secular reader of Thomas will find different kinds of authority in each.

Yet the resonance is real. Placed together, Dylan Thomas’s poem and the Bhagavad-Gītā supply complementary languages for living with mortality. The Gītā offers metaphysical assurance that stabilizes duty; Thomas offers performative evidence that stabilizes love. Reading them in sequence furnishes a doubled resource: the cognitive support for moral courage and the experiential rite that enacts fidelity. Ultimately, the human habit of rehearsing assurance—whether through scripture, chant, or poetic refrain—remains one of our most effective answers to the finality of death. The poem and the Gītā show two durable and powerful ways we practice that rehearsal.

The Referenced Work:

Bhagavad-gītā 2.20

na jāyate mriyate vā kadācin nāyaṁ bhūtvā bhavitā vā na bhūyaḥ ajo nityaḥ śāśvato ’yaṁ purāṇo na hanyate hanyamāne śarīre

"For the soul there is neither birth nor death at any time. He has not come into being, does not come into being, and will not come into being. He is unborn, eternal, ever-existing and primeval. He is not slain when the body is slain." ~ Sri Krsna

~

And death shall have no dominion

By Dylan Thomas

And death shall have no dominion.
Dead men naked they shall be one
With the man in the wind and the west moon;
When their bones are picked clean and the clean bones gone,
They shall have stars at elbow and foot;
Though they go mad they shall be sane,
Though they sink through the sea they shall rise again;
Though lovers be lost love shall not;
And death shall have no dominion.

And death shall have no dominion.
Under the windings of the sea
They lying long shall not die windily;
Twisting on racks when sinews give way,
Strapped to a wheel, yet they shall not break;
Faith in their hands shall snap in two,
And the unicorn evils run them through;
Split all ends up they shan't crack;
And death shall have no dominion.

And death shall have no dominion.
No more may gulls cry at their ears
Or waves break loud on the seashores;
Where blew a flower may a flower no more
Lift its head to the blows of the rain;
Though they be mad and dead as nails,
Heads of the characters hammer through daisies;
Break in the sun till the sun breaks down,
And death shall have no dominion.

om tat sat