Into the Forest, Towards Oblivion: Edward Thomas and D. H. Lawrence

 Here I look at two 20^th century poems about death and dying.   Each deals with the subject  through images drawn from the natural world or from everyday experience. The poems are  are Edward Thomas's Lights Out and D. H. Lawrence's The Ship of Death. Both poems contemplate the end of life with unusual honesty, yet they arrive at very different visions of what awaits us. I explore the contrast.

The poems are here [ Valid June 15th 2026: Open in new tab]: The Ship of Death  and  Lights Out

Edward Thomas's Lights Out and D. H. Lawrence's The Ship of Death are poems that confront mortality without sentimentality. Neither turns away from the fact of death. But these poems express two very different visions of what it means to approach the end of life.

In Lights Out, Thomas guides the traveller to the edge of an "unfathomable" forest. Roads and tracks lead towards it, but at the brink they lose their certainty:

Many a road and track
That, since the dawn's first crack,
Up to the forest brink,
Deceived the travellers,
Suddenly now blurs,
And in they sink.

The roads of life appear to promise destinations and purposes. Yet at the forest's edge these distinctions dissolve. The traveller enters a realm beyond ordinary understanding.

Crucially, Thomas never tells us what lies within the wood. The mystery remains intact. The forest is 'unfathomable' because it resists explanation. Yet the poem is not troubled by this ignorance. On the contrary, its serenity arises from accepting it. The speaker declares, 'I desire to go.'There is no struggle against the darkness. The forest is entered willingly. The poem's power lies in its trust that not everything needs to be known. Death is imagined as a mystery into which one passes.

Lawrence's poem begins from a very different premise. Here death is not a mystery, but a destination repeatedly named. That destination is oblivion.

Build then the ship of death, for you must take
the longest journey, to oblivion.

The word appears more than once and stands at the centre of the poem's vision. Unlike Thomas's forest, oblivion is not unfathomable. Its meaning is stark. It suggests the extinction of consciousness, the erasure of identity, the end of striving and memory.  

Yet the drama of Lawrence's poem does not lie solely in its destination. It lies in the possibility that the destination is not always  finally reached. The poem's most striking moment comes with a sudden reversal:

Ah wait, wait, for there is the dawn,
the cruel dawn of coming back to life...

The adjective 'cruel' transforms the poem. The return to life is not welcomed. It is endured. The voyager approaches oblivion, only to be drawn once more into existence. Death itself is no longer the primary challenge. The challenge is recurrence. The voyage is undertaken, interrupted, and perhaps undertaken again.

This difference separates Lawrence fundamentally from Thomas. Thomas imagines a mystery entered into. For  Lawrence the destination has a finality, but it is the journey which carries the uncertainty.

Even the famous image of the 'little ship, with oars and food and little dishes' acquires a different significance in this light. At first these details seem reassuringly domestic. They bring the language of the comfort of ordinary life into a poem about death. Yet they do not soften the destination. Rather, they express sympathy for the traveller. The little provisions are not evidence that the journey is easy. They are evidence that it is difficult. The tenderness lies not in confidence about what awaits but in care for the one who must undertake the voyage.

Meantime, Lawrence's allusions to Shakespeare's Hamlet are particularly revealing. Hamlet imagines death as ‘the undiscovered country from whose bourn no traveller returns.’ Lawrence presents a more unsettling possibility. His poem expresses the  anxiety is that the traveller may return before the voyage has finally achieved its destination. The repeated references to oblivion suggest that extinction remains the goal towards which the journey moves, yet the 'cruel dawn of coming back to life' introduces that possibility of interruption and recurrence.

The Hamlet echoes deepen the poem's darkness. Shakespeare's prince contemplates the possibility of ending life with a ‘bare bodkin’  yet hesitates at the uncertainty of what may follow death. Lawrence inherits something of that sombre atmosphere. The question is no longer whether death should be chosen; death is inevitable. The question is how one prepares for its arrival.

The result is a poem that possesses a stoic rather than a consoling wisdom. Lawrence does not ask us to trust a mystery. He does not promise that oblivion is benign. Instead he insists that the voyage awaits us and that preparation is necessary. This is where the contrast with Thomas is sharpest. Thomas finds peace in mystery. Lawrence finds dignity in necessity. The traveller in Lights Out walks willingly into the wood. The voyager in The Ship of Death builds his vessel because he must.

Both poets confront mortality honestly. Both reject sentimentality. Yet they arrive at very different forms of wisdom. Thomas asks us to trust the darkness. Lawrence asks us to prepare for it.

 

When Inclusion Becomes Erosion — Revised

 

Inclusion without capacity isn’t compassion — it’s abandonment. When the state hollows out, communities are left to carry tensions they never chose. Here, I have written about how Britain’s outsourced systems are turning welcome into erosion.

I take my cue from Anoosh Chakelian’s 'How Britain Lost Control' New Statesman cover story this week. The article offers a vivid, unsettling portrait of a country where the state has hollowed itself out, outsourcing its responsibilities to private contractors and leaving communities to absorb the consequences. Her reporting from Wigan — of overcrowded HMOs, fraying neighbourhoods, and a government that has lost the capacity to enact its own ideals — illuminates the very dynamics I was trying to name.

This revision is an attempt to place my earlier reflections within that wider, more concrete frame. The erosion I wrote about  in the abstract is visible in the streets, houses, and lives Chakelian describes. To speak of inclusion today is to reckon with the structures that make it possible — or impossible. And so I have rewritten this piece to acknowledge the lived realities that now press upon it. Realities  about which many  folk living comfortable privileged lives for example, continue to parrot abstract banalities.

There are moments when a society’s virtues begin to fray not because they were wrong, but because the institutions meant to hold them have grown too weak to bear their weight. We speak easily of inclusion, hospitality, openness. These are good words, necessary words. But they depend on a moral architecture  and when that architecture weakens, even our best intentions can become sources of strain.

In recent years I have found myself returning to this question: What happens when a society tries to welcome more people than it can meaningfully care for? Not because the newcomers are unwelcome, nor because the locals are unkind, but because the state that once mediated between them has abandoned the business of leadership and lost the ability to understand a nation which daily witnesses a tolerance of injustice and unfairness and which shows a lack of empathy for justified concerns.

Anoosh Chakelian’s recent reporting from Wigan offers hard detail. She describes Darlington Street — a long terrace of redbrick houses, once home to mill workers and miners — now transformed into a symbol of Britain’s political and moral drift. “Every other house has been taken up as an HMO,” one MP tells her, as private contractors pack asylum seekers, ex‑offenders, and the homeless into the cheapest streets they can find. The result is not hostility so much as exhaustion: neighbours who no longer know who lives next door, communities that feel transient, and a quiet sense that something once solid has begun to dissolve.

This is not the fault of those who arrive, nor of those already there. It is the consequence of a state that has outsourced its responsibilities to companies whose duty is not to the common good but to the contract and it's financial drivers. Serco, Mears, Clearsprings — names that hover at the edges of public consciousness — now run vast tracts of what used to be the work of government. They house asylum seekers, manage detention centres, operate speed cameras, run NHS catering, and even maintain the radar stations that watch the skies. They are, as Chakelian puts it, the “shadow state”: indispensable, unaccountable, and largely unseen.

In such a landscape, inclusion becomes a slogan rather than a practice. The state disperses vulnerable people into the cheapest corners of the country, leaving local councils to absorb the consequences without the means to respond. Residents feel policies are being done to them, not with them. Asylum seekers live in houses where toilets go unfixed for a year, where four mattresses are pushed into a single room, where the weekly support payment sometimes fails to arrive and where easy money is to be made by property speculating go-betweens who can buy up properties and sell them on as risk-free investments as a Serco- managed packages. And all the while, the political class speaks of compassion and control as though either were still within its grasp.

This is the erosion which should concern us all: not the erosion of values, but the erosion of the structures that make values possible. A society cannot meaningfully include newcomers if it cannot house its own citizens. It cannot preach neighbourliness while leaving neighbours to negotiate overcrowded streets, rising rents, and the slow unravelling of local trust. It cannot ask communities to carry burdens that the state itself has deliberately laid aside.

The tragedy is that everyone suffers. The asylum seeker who fled war only to find him/herself in a broken house and hostile, suspicious neighbours. The lifelong resident who watches her street change overnight and feels she has no voice in the matter. The council officer who knows what needs to be done but lacks the budget to do it. The politician who promises reform but inherits a system too entangled to unwind.

Inclusion, in such a context, becomes a fragile thing. It requires more than sentiment. It requires capacity — the ability to build homes, to plan coherently for education and employment, to mediate between competing needs, to hold communities together rather than leaving them to fray. 

Without that capacity, inclusion becomes erosion: not because we welcomed too many - though as an island nation losing  vast tracts of productive land for food security or for breathing space away from crowded cityscapes this also can be debated - but because we built too little, planned too little, cared too little at the level where care must be organised.

We need a  recognition that compassion without competence is a brittle virtue.

In the end, the question is not whether we should be an open or a closed country, generous or guarded, welcoming or wary. The deeper question is whether we still possess the civic and moral power to hold the tensions that any real society must carry: the tension between neighbourliness and change, between compassion and capacity, between the needs of those who arrive and the needs of those already here. 

A state that has hollowed itself out cannot hold these tensions; it leaves communities to absorb them alone, and then wonders why resentment grows. If we are to rebuild anything worth calling a common life, we will need a politics that can bear disagreement without panic, and a public realm strong enough to mediate between competing goods.

Our country needs to be governed — not managed, not outsourced, not placated — by a government that understands inclusivity and understands that dissent needs to be part of that inclusivity, not judged by any arbitrary virtue‑signalling standard.

 

 

Bob Dylan, Faith, and the Language of Darkness

I was looking at two songs by Bob Dylan. The first is "Gotta Serve Somebody" from his 1979 album Slow Train Coming, which was one of 3 (I believe) issued during a time when he committed himself to a belief in Jesus Christ, in a charismatic, evangelical environment, and so made that leap of faith known to Bible believing Christians.  

Gotta Serve Somebody https://share.google/qdKHTmB00Y348j3hk

The second is Not Dark Yet from his 1997 album Time Out of Mind. Looking at the lyrics of these two songs, and also understanding from later interviews that Bob Dylan is still a man of faith, I thought I might explore the differences in the language and themes of these two songs, and think about Bob Dylan's development and use of lyrics in those intervening years, which might also reveal changes in his approach to his faith. This is what emerged.

Not Dark Yet https://share.google/npqK5oXCa3ujm09Bx 

Gotta Serve Somebody  is direct, declarative and prophetic. Its message is clear: every human being ultimately serves either God or the devil. The lyric proceeds with the certainty of a sermon. Social distinctions are stripped away, and the listener is confronted with a spiritual choice. The voice is authoritative, reflecting the confidence of a recent convert who believes he has discovered a fundamental truth about existence.

Nearly twenty years later, Not Dark Yet presents a very different voice. Here there is no proclamation, no doctrine, and no explicit reference to Christ or salvation. Instead, the song inhabits a mood of weariness and mortality. The famous refrain, "It's not dark yet, but it's getting there," evokes aging, decline, and the approach of death. Rather than offering answers, the lyric dwells within a state of consciousness.

Some Christian listeners have viewed this change as evidence of a weakening of faith. From an evangelical perspective, life "in Christ" brings assurance, hope and spiritual renewal. The New Testament proclaims victory over death and despair through Christ's resurrection. If this is so, why should a believer continue to speak in the language of darkness? Why contemplate suffering rather than transcend it through prayer and trust in God?

This objection seems to me to raise an important question, which can only be answered by highlighting the distinction between faith and art. Faith enables a proclamation of truths and offers answers, and indeed lives within them. Art often seeks to describe experience in all its complexity, even when no resolution is immediately apparent.

Going down the route of art, we find for example the literary critic Christopher Ricks who draws attention to the affinities between Not Dark Yet and John Keats's Ode to a Nightingale. Both works explore weariness, mortality, and the attraction of release from suffering. Neither arrives at a final conclusion. Instead, each remains suspended between life and death, hope and uncertainty. The power of Dylan's lyric lies partly in this refusal to define precisely what the approaching darkness means.

At the same time, Not Dark Yet can be understood within a religious tradition older and broader than post-Lutheran evangelicalism or the preoccupations of the English Romantic poets. The voices of Job, Ecclesiastes and the Psalms all find expression in darkness, lament and questioning. These texts are not records of unbelief but of faith wrestling with the realities of human existence. They remind us that  life in the Spirit has always contained both confidence and anguish.

What emerges, is not necessarily a contrast between faith and doubt, but rather a contrast between two modes of spiritual expression. One mode emphasises certainty, redemption and proclamation. The other emphasises contemplation, mystery and the honest acknowledgement of suffering. The first finds its natural home in preaching and testimony. The second often finds its home in poetry and song.

This distinction helps explain why Not Dark Yet continues to resonate with listeners of many beliefs. The song does not argue for a doctrine. It gives shape to a universal human experience. In doing so, it occupies a space shared by biblical wisdom literature, Romantic poetry, and modern existential reflection.

The journey from Gotta Serve Somebody to Not Dark Yet may therefore be understood not as a movement away from spiritual concerns, but as a movement from proclamation to meditation. The 1979 Dylan speaks as a witness. The 1997 Dylan speaks as a poet. One announces a truth; the other explores what it feels like to live in the shadow of mortality.

Whether one views this development as a loss of certainty, a deepening of wisdom, or simply an evolution of artistic voice will depend largely on one's own understanding of faith. Yet the enduring fascination of these songs lies precisely in their ability to sustain a meaningful contemplation, inviting us to consider whether faith abolishes darkness or teaches us how to live within it.