Dancing With Death And Deity

The thesis aims at formulating the development and emergence of the Self in Dylan Thomas's poetry. With a summary of Jungian definition and explanation of the Self, the thesis starts from the important function of transformation in man's Self-realization. The natural metamorphosis of butterfly is used for a systematical unveiling of Self-realization process of Dylan Thomas's poetic subject. The individuation must experience the second birth. The emergency of imago is compared to the unity of life and death; the symbolical death of puparium is to yielding to death, and nirvana is to fulfillment of spiritual transformation after resurrection. The unity of three conceptions has been constructed comprehensively to make a systematic analysis of the poet's death-rebirth process, as the title suggests, which is a dance by death and deity.In the second chapter, transformation is fully applied to and examined in Thomas's poetry. The awareness of death dwells everywhere, on which the poetic subject is in ceaseless meditation. In the juvenile stage, the poet is hung over by the shadow of death. The unity of life and death could be found easily and expressed in many images especially in that of womb and tomb. Like the disintegration of larval, the poet instinctively sensed the motif. The puparuim—death of false self—is the larva's journey into night of soul. In the stage the poet has bent his kneel to death instinct and obeyed the lead of the Self, stepping to the pilgrimage of rebirth. The naissance of true self is in succession. The energy exchange of consciousness and unconsciousness gives birth to a new life and new value orientation. The poet begins to envisage death, believe in rebirth, and accept death as necessary part of natural circular.Chapter 3 discusses transformative death complex, God-image and their representation. It is death that leads the poet to carry through perpetual introspective meditation and pursuit for the existence of the Self. Thomas projected the self-image to God-image and thus subverted the traditional Christian God. However, this subversion resulted in turbulence of ego and dispossessed inner world. The mental Oneness is hard to achieve and forever in contradictory.It is concluded that Thomas's poetic reflection on death and deity is actually the process of unveiling of the Self. The subject is forever deposited in contradictory and course of consummation of the Self, and is constituted with sporadic personality fragments. The reading of Thomas from the perspective of analytical psychology provides a new dimension to understand the poet and his works, and shows that meditation on death and deity as pursuit of the Self serves as keynote of Dylan Thomas's poems.