And death shall have no dominion

Study Guide

Literary Devices

Tone

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Literary Devices Tone

The tone of Thomas’s poem is perhaps best characterized as lyrical. The adjective lyrical has a general meaning that refers primarily to emotional expressiveness. More specifically, the word emphasizes the aesthetic qualities of emotional expression. A lyrical poem is therefore characterized, above all, by the beauty of its language. In the case of “And death shall have no dominion,” the poem’s lyrical qualities are evident from the very beginning. Consider the five lines that open the poem:

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.

Several devices endow this passage with powerful melodic beauty. First, note the use of alliteration (uh-LIT-er-AY-shun), which refers to instances where sequential or nearby words begin with the same letter. The words “death” and “dominion” in the first line alliterate. The third line also features alliteration, though in this case the alliteration creates a striking parallel pattern between W and M sounds: “With the man in the wind and the west moon.” In the following line, Thomas contrasts this moment of parallelism with an example of syntactic reversal, such that “bones . . . clean” becomes “clean bones.” These and other devices generate the poem’s expressive power and overarching lyricism.