And death shall have no dominion.

"And death shall have no dominion" is the opening refrain of Dylan Thomas’s poem “And Death Shall Have No Dominion,” written in the 1930s and first published in 1933. The title and refrain echo the King James Bible (Romans 6:9), but Thomas repurposes the scriptural cadence for a modern lyric meditation on mortality. Composed early in his career, the poem belongs to Thomas’s intense, incantatory style of the period, where religious language, bodily imagery, and cosmic cycles mingle. Rather than a doctrinal statement, the line functions as a repeated chorus asserting—against violence, decay, and historical catastrophe—a kind of enduring human or elemental continuity.

The line declares defiance toward death’s apparent finality. In Thomas’s poem, “dominion” suggests not merely death’s inevitability but its claim to total rule—over body, memory, love, and meaning. By repeating the refrain, Thomas turns it into an incantation: even when bodies break, scatter, or are erased by time and suffering, something persists—whether spirit, love, the natural cycle of matter, or the imaginative force that refuses annihilation. The power of the line lies in its paradoxical blend of biblical authority and modern ambiguity: it sounds like resurrection, yet it can also be read as a secular insistence that death cannot fully extinguish what has been lived and loved.