Favourite Quote and Why
It’s Day 15 of the #Blogtober14 Challenge with The Daily Tay and Helene in Between! Here is Mary with today’s post of “Favourite Quote and Why.”
Being a literary sort, I have an awful lot of favorite quotes, from all kinds of different books and poems and articles and songs and plays. But one of my all time favorites is from a Dylan Thomas poem.
I was very little when I started obsessing over my mom’s book of poems by Dylan Thomas, about 7 or 8. I barely understood what I was reading, and yet the language captivated me. This wild Welsh man poet and his strangely compelling turns of phrase became something I would come back to again and again and again over the years. In time I became interested in the poet himself (and his tempestuous relationship with his wife Caitlin) and read a number of biographies over the years. But I always came back to the poems themselves, saying them out loud, trying to understand them, marvelling at his complete mastery of the language. I liked how primal they felt to me, like he had cut them off a stone or discovered them in a storm. I just couldn’t get enough of them.
Later on, as I grew and had my own experiences with loss and heartache, the poems started to resonate even more. I would turn to the book in a state of emotional turmoil and find an understanding there. After a particularly harsh series of heartaches, I took a line from the poem ‘And Death Shall Have No Dominion’ as a mantra for awhile and eventually I even registered it on a star. Right up there in the sensitive area below Orion’s belt, where heartaches belong.
Here’s the quote:
“Though lovers be lost love shall not;
and death shall have no dominion. “
And please do check out the poem in its entirety, here:
https://web.cs.dal.ca/~
