In 1933, a grocer and amateur poet named Bert Trick issued a challenge to his friend, Dylan Thomas. The challenge was for each poet to compose verses on the subject of immortality. Thomas’s response to this challenge resulted in the poem “And death shall have no dominion.” For Thomas, immortality didn’t mean everlasting life, nor did it invoke religious ideas about the afterlife. Instead, the notion of immortality conjured enigmatic visions that weave together varied references to the ocean, madness, flowers, and skeletons floating in the cosmic void. Thomas structured his poem around a powerful refrain that gives the work its title, and which repeats at the beginning and ending of each stanza: “And death shall have no dominion” (lines 1, 9, 10, 18, 19, and 27). The mantra-like repetition of this refrain insists on death’s radically diminished power over the domain of existence. Thomas wrote the poem in a highly lyrical style enriched by assonance and consonance as well as a dynamic meter that mimics the poem’s oceanic imagery. He also displays a preference for slant rhyme, which evades the stifling formality of a rigid rhyme scheme and maintains the vitality of the poem’s language—once again allowing death no dominion.

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