Theme Of Death In Rain By Edward Thomas

Register to read the introduction… Thanatos is the motivation or desire to escape and therefore this completion of oblivion seems to conclude the poem. Further the ‘tempest’ brought Thomas a vision of nature of both life and death as it ‘tells me [him]’ and gives him a glimpse of death, which is at once a ‘bleak’ sense of consolidation. The epiphany that Thomas experiences gives this sense of awareness of mortality and the value of life. The oblivion of death is contrasted with the gift of life as Thomas describes himself as ‘helpless among the living and the dead’, which shows his introspection of his personal significance in the world. …show more content…
In ‘The Solider’ by Rupert Brooke the poet looks at his own significance of his life after death by asking the reader to think of ‘forever England’, unchanged and undamaged, ‘if I [he] should die’ rather than contemplating the negative side of death unlike Thomas does so in ‘Rain’. A further contrast to make would be with Wilfred Owen’s ‘Dulce et Decorum Est’ as it reveals the horror of war and the deaths of soldiers, rather than looking at his own suffering and death. Another comparison to make is with the poem ‘A Man I Killed’ by Thomas Hardy who identifies not what war does to the villages back home but what war does to the soldier. His introspection of his actions suggest his guilt and shame of killing a man who, if ‘met where any bar is’, would be a simple friend. This is complimented by the suggestion of the analogy between ‘broken reeds’ and broken men as a result of the war within the poem