And death shall have no dominion: Motifs

Madness versus Sanity

Twice in the poem the speaker invokes an oppositional relationship between madness and sanity. Yet at the same time they invoke this opposition, they seem to resolve it, such that madness and sanity become one. For example, in the first stanza, the speaker declares: “Though they go mad they shall be sane” (line 6). The speaker echoes this sentiment in a parallel passage in the third stanza (lines 24–27):

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.

The speaker begins this passage with syntax that’s similar to the previous passage: “Though they be mad. . . .” However, they don’t continue with a grammatically logical conclusion as they did before: “Though they go mad they shall be sane.” Instead, the speaker devolves into a series of confusing images that seem to be generated primarily from wordplay. The vision presented in these lines seems intentionally opaque and surreal, as if we readers are meant to feel a sense of madness arise as we try to make sense of it. Yet the speaker’s overall message seems to emphasize the unification of opposites. Just as death and life are unified through their belonging to a larger domain of existence, so too are madness and sanity.

Cosmic Imagery

Cosmic imagery appears at both the beginning and the end of the poem, evoking notions of the vastness of existence and the timelessness of eternity. In the opening stanza (lines 2–5), the speaker conjures an enigmatic vision of skeletons suspended in the heavens:

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.

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.” This juxtaposition of human skeletons and stars offers a suggestive image of the mystic simultaneity of the universe. The speaker echoes this cosmic imagery in the final stanza (lines 26–27):

Break in the sun till the sun breaks down,
And death shall have no dominion.

The image of the sun’s breakdown offers an apocalyptic vision of an end to all life on this planet. Yet even here, the speaker confounds logic by persisting in their claim that “death shall have no dominion.” In this case, the speaker announces their faith in the everlasting nature of the universe at large.

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