I find this poem from Dylan Thomas immensely comforting. It speaks with hope and glory of death and of his vision of rebirth.

Thomas wrote intensely about life of unity, relationality and process. In his introduction to Thomas’ Collected poems John Goodby puts it like this:

“According to the ‘process’ view of the world, we are not merely born to die, or even know that we are dying as we live; conception itself is a death, ‘the golden shot’ of semen ‘Storms in the freezing tomb’ of the womb. The embryo dies in being born into the world, and elbows other beings into the grave; but their deaths are, conversely, ‘entrances’ into the life of decay and re-entry into the natural cycle. Thomas horrifyingly compresses what is ordinarily drawn out, as if in some time-lapse film, while continually contracting and expanding a poem’s scale of reference from the microscopic to the cosmic. Fusing zygotes ‘unwrinkle in the stars’, ‘clocking tides’ pulse in the blood, manifesting the amoral ‘force’ which surges through the universe, and to which everything must submit. Linear time is yet another illusion; for Thomas it is as relative as anything else, and he finds equivalence between conception, gestation, adolescence and death in poems such as ‘From love’s first fever’. From cosmic flux to quantum foam, the only certainty is that there is no certainty: even energy is matter, matter energy, and time and space are spacetime”