And death shall have no dominion

Study Guide

Literary Devices

Rhyme

Save

Literary Devices Rhyme

Just as Thomas plays with rhythm but doesn’t restrict himself to a formal metrical scheme, he also plays with rhyme while avoiding a strict rhyme scheme. Each of the poem’s three stanzas incorporates end rhyme, but they all do it in a slightly different way. To take but one example, let’s consider how rhyme works in the opening stanza (lines 1–9):

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.

All the lines in this stanza have at least one rhyming pair, which results in the following rhyme scheme: AAAABCCBA. Significantly, the A and B rhymes, which are predominant in the stanzas, are all slant rhymes, which means they are only approximate sonic matches. Note, for instance, how the first four lines end with words that end with similar but not identical “-on” sounds: “dominion,” “one,” “moon,” and “gone.” The only exact rhyme in the stanza appears between “sane” and “again” (lines 6–7)—at least, it’s exact when spoken with a British accent. Many twentieth-century poets avoided exact rhyme because they felt that excessive ornamentation robbed language of its vitality. Read in this way, Thomas’s preference for slant rhyme demonstrates an evasion of formality that maintains the liveliness of the poem’s language—once again allowing death no dominion.