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.

In the poem’s opening lines (1–5), the speaker introduces the reader to the subject of immortality. However, they do so in a distinct and enigmatic way. The image the speaker conjures here has a surreal quality, which makes it difficult to “see” in the mind’s eye. They speak of “dead men” who are “naked,” yet whose remains have been “picked clean” to the point where they exist solely as skeletons. Furthermore, the speaker makes the mysterious and prophetic claim that these dead men “shall be one / With the man in the wind and the west moon.” It isn’t immediately obvious what they mean by this, but their emphasis on a kind of mystic unity seems clear enough. The speaker confirms this notion of unity through the image of these skeletons floating in a cosmic void with “stars at elbow and feet.” Here, the skeletons of the dead men no longer exist on a recognizably human scale. Instead, they appear situated among enormous astrological bodies. This juxtaposition of human skeletons and stars offers a suggestive image of the mystic simultaneity of the universe. It is this cosmic vision of eternity that the speaker invokes as a form of immortality.

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.

These lines (13–18) come from the poem’s middle stanza. There, the speaker turns toward images of violence, starting with a reference to a device known as a rack. Used for torture and interrogation, a rack consists of a wooden frame to which the victim’s hands and feet are secured. The torturer uses a ratchet mechanism to forcibly draw the hands and feet away from each other, until the point when the victim’s joints break and cause excruciating pain. The speaker also references an execution wheel, which was also used to torture the body to the point of physical and spiritual breakdown. Finally, the speaker makes an enigmatic reference to “unicorn evils” that shall “run [the victims] through.” This may be an allusion to a passage in Pliny the Elder’s Natural History, where the Roman philosopher describes the unicorn as a particularly dangerous foe. But regardless of its source, the image the speaker conjures here involves the impaling of a victim’s body. Yet with all these images of torture and violence, the speaker insists, paradoxically, that the victims “shall not break” (line 14) and that they “shan’t crack” (line 17).

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.

These lines (22–25) appear in the final stanza. Like other images in the poem, the vision presented here seems intentionally opaque and surreal, as if we readers are meant to feel madness descend we try to make sense of it. The challenge rests on Thomas’s use of wordplay. The image of a flower blowing in the wind in the first line undergoes a transformation in the second line, where blows refer to drops of rain hitting the head of the flower. Then, in the third line, the speaker makes a metaphorical link between flowers and nails through the idiomatic phrase, “dead as nails.” Next, stemming from this reference to nails, the speaker makes another logical leap to reference a hammer. However, the hammer here is a verb rather than a noun: the “heads of the characters hammer through daisies.” This line is particularly difficult to make sense of, particularly because of the word “characters.” Yet if we recall that a typewriter makes a hammering action to imprint individual characters (i.e., letters) on a page, we can interpret the speaker as talking about writing. The ultimate point seems to be that even in this apparent madness, the thread of life remains through the transformative power of poetic language.