In this article I will show how Dylan Thomas represents the characters he has mourned through two of his poems, After the Funeral and Elegy. The two poems mourn Thomas’s close relatives, his father in After the Funeral and his aunt in Elegy. Despite similar topics, the two poems are highly contrasting in the way that Thomas’s relatives are presented which tells the reader he had different feelings towards the two. In After the Funeral, the tone is much more frantic and confused compared with the calm and sombre tone of Elegy.

After the Funeral opens with Thomas discussing the hypocrisy of friends and relatives’ praises after his Aunt’s funeral, calling them “mule praises, brays”, ones which should not be taken notice of. He does not feel the same way about his Aunt and says the “image [is] blindly magnified out of praise”. He presents her as being a simple woman who would not want to hear such praise. She is described as having a “fountain heart”, suggesting she is very loving, however Thomas reminds the reader that this is exaggerated for the mourning of his Aunt, and instead says “she would not have me sinking in the holy flood of her heart’s fame”; despite how loving she was, she would not be so loving to Thomas that he would be drowned by love.

Unlike After the Funeral, Elegy is centred on Thomas watching his father die at his bedside. This poem is much more traditional in the way that grief and the central character is presented compared with After the Funeral. For example, Thomas presents the idea that his father will go to heaven and be at peace; “Forever may he live lightly, at last, on the last, crossed Hill”; this itself forms part of a religious lexical field, connoting Jesus’ crucifixion. Other uses of this lexical field include “I prayed” and “crucifixed hill”, presenting Thomas’ father as a religious man

Unlike Elegy, After the Funeral does not carry the same sense of conventional grief or upset as one would expect. Instead, a violent lexical field is evident throughout, such as “a desolate boy who slits his throat”; a powerful image of extreme emotion showing how greatly missed his Aunt is. The use of “smack of the spade” is also quite violent and is used to describe his Aunt being buried; the impact of seeing this had evoked a strong emotion within Thomas which is presented here, reflecting his feelings for his Aunt. Conversely, he calls his Aunt, “dead, humped Ann”, a graphic and de-humanising way to describe his Aunt but presents conveys Thomas’s huge grief of her death. He also says she had a “bent spirit”, creating cohesion with this lexical field, and perhaps suggests those who are mourning her have changed her spirit, coming back to their meaningless praises once more.