Elegy is an unfinished poem by Dylan Thomas, written to honor his Father. Elegy might have been penned with my Dad in mind, including the blindness. The French-Canadian Roman Catholic Church, St-Clément de Beauharnois embraced Joseph Henri Adrien Laplante into the community in 1906, and bid him a fond farewell on December 26, 1998. My Father was 92. I miss my Dad's humor, his grit, his need for truth, his steadfastness, his integrity. An honorable man. I was very fortunate to be his daughter. I called him "Pa", short for "Papa" in French Canada. Pa, I love you! La vie semble plus fragile depuis que tu n'es plus avec nous!

Too proud to die; broken and blind he died  The darkest way, and did not turn away, A cold kind man brave in his narrow pride  On that darkest day. Oh, forever may  He lie lightly, at last, on the last, crossed  Hill, under the grass, in love, and there grow  Young among the long flocks, and never lie lost  Or still all the numberless days of his death, though Above all he longed for his mother's breast  Which was rest and dust, and in the kind ground  The darkest justice of death, blind and unblessed,  Let him find no rest but be fathered and found,  I prayed in the crouching room, by his blind bed,  In the muted house, one minute before  Noon, and night, and light. The rivers of the dead  Veined his poor hand I held, and I saw  Through his unseeing eyes to the roots of the sea.  (An old tormented man three-quarters blind,  I am not too proud to cry that He and he  Will never never go out of my mind.  All his bones crying, and poor in all but pain,

Being innocent, he dreaded that he died  Hating his God, but what he was was plain:  An old kind man brave in his burning pride.  The sticks of the house were his; his books he owned. Even as a baby he had never cried;  Nor did he now, save to his secret wound.  Out of his eyes I saw the last light glide.  Here among the light of the lording sky  An old blind man is with me where I go  Walking in the meadows of his son's eye  On whom a world of ills came down like snow.  He cried as he died, fearing at last the spheres'  Last sound, the world going out without a breath:  Too proud to cry, too frail to check the tears,  And caught between two nights, blindness and death.  O deepest wound of all that he should die  On that darkest day. Oh, he could hide  The tears out of his eyes, too proud to cry.  Until I die he will not leave my side.)

Copyright Information
To the best of my knowledge
this poem is in the public domain.