The dramatic art song “A Refusal to Mourn the Death, by Fire, of a Child in London” is about Dylan Thomas’s optimism in human possibilities for progressive enlightenment in the world rather than about a religious certainty that comes right in the earnest. Thomas’s refusal to lament the death of a child in the London air-raid testifies to his refusal to be political, social and historical in his functioning as he has been committing himself to empathize with the tragic sufferings of the fellowbeings since the beginning of his poetic career. His commitment to disinterested goodwill and action stands in contrast to the non-committed functioning of his contemporary poets who refuse to mourn the death of a child due to their being committed to function as poets of their own choice, love, pity and peace, their being adopted to work for the romantic, political, patriotic and historical tradition. Hence this paper, adopting a figurative approach, endeavours to decipher the essential statement and to decode the much compressed, obscure meaning of this popular poem as the critics’s focus on the poem is limited more to paraphrasal and stylistic levels.

Set in a context of colonization, Butterfly Burning is a fictional work that digs out the colonized’s mind to illustrate the brutality and unfairness of a ruthless system that gangrenes a whole community’s reason of existence. This paper which finds ground on the theory of “the paradox of silence” as it is defined by Maurice Zundel, highlights a reflexion based on the social and political meaning of the praxis of silence among men and women who are deprived of the backbone of their raison d’être. It focuses on the built-in meaning attached to framework, sex and music in an ambient world silenced by the readable and audible voice of voicelessness.