'After the Funeral' is, I think, the only one of Dylan Thomas' poems to deal with a

specific individual - whereas most of his work is concerned with abstractions or nature,
'Ann Jones' is a very personal,very particularized kind of poem. It's no less powerful for
all that, of course - indeed, many critics consider it the acme of Thomas' art, the
kind of poetic statement that he would have turned to more and more, had
he lived a bit longer.
This poem is an elegy, reflecting, once again, Dylan Thomas' concern with tombs.
Abandoning most of the conventional matter of the elegy, the poet here is self-
consciously absorbed with writing about his subject and comments on the appropriate
way of memorializing his aunt, who was the mistress of Fern Hill. His awareness that the
poem may be a monument disproportionate with the natural life of the real woman is at
the living center of the poem.
Shaped by the phrases beginning "After," the first twenty lines fall into two parts: lines
one through nine treat the feelings of the "desolate boy" at funeral time; lines ten through
twenty are in the voice of "I," who will, in line twenty-one, announce himself as bard.
The "mule praises" of line one insist on the presence of a real mule with ears like sails
shaking in the wind, an animal likely to be watched closely by a young boy. The wooden
peg tapped "in the thick/Grave's foot" is the first official marker of the grave and thus an
inspiration for the poet to carve "this skyward statue" in verse, the true monument. First,
as a boy, in the early part of the poem, he comes to terms with the death and his feelings
about it. The images of her lids, her teeth, her eyes so sunken that they resemble an
expectoration, the puddle-like sleeve folds, in conjunction with the sleep-tormenting
smack of the spade, are desolating. He imagines himself in the coffin shedding dry
leaves, but the poetic outcome of this grief is minimal, although perhaps very real: "one
bone to light with a judgment clout."
The wake, the "tear-stuffed time" held on the farm before burial, provided images from
which the true verse memorial could be elicited. The "stuffed fox," "stale fern" and
dowager's hump were facts about the aunt and they lead the poet to significant metaphor -
the "hooded, fountain heart" with the poet's concomitant crisis of consciousness. The
real woman would not have approved of his being immersed in the hyperbolic metaphor
of her known compassion. Literally, "her death was still a drop" too tiny for poetic
magnification, but the druid poet must create the fiction of her monument in words. In
conflict with himself, he has written what might be "a monstrous image
blindly/Magnified out of praise."
Yet the very size suggested by "Magnified" is a key to the monument described in the
lines beginning with twenty-one: it is a "skyward statue" with a "giant skull," and there is
a "monumental/argument." Lines twenty-one through twenty-six are the most joyful,
creating the sound of religious music. Her "wood-tongued virtue" makes her a primitive
goddess of the forest, a suitable icon for a "brown chapel." The "Babble like a bellbuoy"
has always, however, seemed (to this writer) to be a precious line, its alliterations too
easy to suggest the universal praises of the seas and the choir. The "ferned and foxy
woods" is a transformation of the fox and fern (line eleven) of the living room on the
farm. The sign of grace for her spirit is the cross made by the four birds flying from the
four directions.
In lines twenty-seven through forty the bard is the maker of a tombstone. Although her
flesh was "meek as milk," the statue with "wild breast and blessed and giant skull" is
appropriate because it is carved from a magnified image of her. Viewed through a wet
window "in a fiercely mourning house in a crooked year," she is perceived as marble-
like, monumental. The dead woman and the sculpted image come together in the last
lines. Nowhere has Thomas better depicted the joining of mortality with immortal art.
Her "scrubbed and sour humble hands" become "These cloud-sopped, marble hands,"
"her threadbare/Whisper in a damp word" becomes "this monumental/Argument of
the hewn voice." And the two conditions join, as well, in one tremendously powerful line,
"And sculptured Ann is seventy years of stone." The conclusion returns to the images that
inspired the monument. It will whelm the poet until "The stuffed lung of the fox
twitch.../And the strutting fern lay seeds on the black sill."