Though lovers be lost love shall not.

This line is from Dylan Thomas’s early lyric “And death shall have no dominion,” first published in the 1930s and later collected in his debut volume. Written in the interwar period, when Thomas was developing his characteristic blend of biblical cadence and modernist intensity, the poem is a defiant meditation on mortality. It repeatedly insists that death cannot ultimately erase what is essential—spirit, memory, and love. The quoted line appears in a stanza that imagines the dissolution of bodies and the scattering of the dead, yet counters that even when individual lovers perish, the force or principle of love endures beyond them.

“Though lovers be lost love shall not” distinguishes between transient human lives and the enduring reality they participate in. Thomas suggests that death can remove particular people (“lovers”), but it cannot extinguish the larger, almost cosmic permanence of “love”—as an energy, value, or binding force in the world. The line’s compressed grammar and near-biblical rhythm give it the feel of a proverb or liturgical assurance, reinforcing the poem’s broader refrain that death lacks final authority. It is both consolatory and resistant: grief is acknowledged (lovers are lost), yet the speaker insists on continuity and meaning beyond individual extinction.