“Thou Shalt Not Kill,” written in 1953–54, is a
long, elegiac poem mourning the death of the
charismatic Welsh poet Dylan Thomas (1917–53),
who drank himself to death during his last orgiastic poetry tour of the United States. It is also
much more: a prophetic poem of enraged protest
denouncing the destruction of many poets in the
worldwide culture of power, violence, and death
and tragically affirming the creative, artistic imagination. By combining diverse poetic techniques,
forms, and traditions kenneth rexroth—who
was not himself a Beat but strongly influenced the
Beat movement—produced this unique poem,
which he performed with the accompaniment of
a live jazz band. Indeed, Rexroth was a pioneer,
with Kenneth Patchen (1911–72) and others, of
performing poetry with musical accompaniment
(some commercially recorded). This ferocious
poem helped to mobilize the San Francisco Poetry
Renaissance in which Beat poetry was born in the
1950s, a decade of cold war, the Korean War, the
black struggle against racism, and the terrifying
threat of nuclear annihilation.
The poem begins, “They are murdering all the
young men” all over the world: Youth are being
destroyed as ruthlessly as, for example, early Christian martyrs who prophetically denounced the lies
and oppression of their society:
They are stoning Stephen . . .
He did great wonders among the people,
They could not stand against his wisdom.
And:
You are broiling Lawrence on his gridiron,
When you demanded he divulge
The hidden treasures of the spirit,
He showed you the poor.
And:
You are shooting Sebastian with arrows.
He kept the faithful steadfast under persecution.
Who is guilty of murdering men of prophetic vision? Rexroth accuses the reader or listener of participating in the “social lie” of coercion and destruction:
You!
The hyena with polished face and bow tie . . .
The vulture dripping with carrion,
Carefully and carelessly robed in imported
tweeds . . .
The jackal in double breasted gabardine . . .
In corporations, in the United Nations,:
The Superego in a thousand uniforms;
You, the finger man of behemoth,
The murderer of the young men.
Behemoth, the monstrous demon of the Bible
and John Milton’s Paradise Lost, is an influential
precurser of Moloch in Allen Ginsberg’s “howl,”
which seems influenced by Rexroth’s poem in
terms of subject, themes, prophetic rhetoric, and
righteous passion. Rexroth even writes in Part III of
this poem: “Three generations of infants / Stuffed
down the maw of Moloch.”
In Part II Rexroth laments the untimely deaths
of more than many American poets, each succinctly memorialized. Each stanza, whose theme
and form are derived from those in “Lament for
the Makeris” by the medieval Scottish poet William Dunbar, ends with a Latin line meaning “The
fear of death disturbs me.”
In Part III Rexroth’s vision expands in a series
of terrifying anecdotes of the destruction of individual poets of many nations in two World Wars:
Here is a mountain of death.
A hill of heads like the Khan piled up,
The first-born of a century
Slaughtered by Herod.
In the final part, which focuses on the death
of Dylan Thomas—“The little spellbinder of Cader
Idris”—Rexroth denounces the murderers in the
culture of death, one by one:
There he lies dead,
By the iceberg of the United Nations.
There he lies sandbagged,
At the foot of the Statue of Liberty.
The Gulf Stream smells of blood.
The poem has been unfairly denounced as
crudely rhetorical, motivated by self-righteous insanity. In this intense, far-reaching, and complex
poem, did Rexroth explode from his own success
in the deadly culture that he attacked? Aesthetic
and ethical controversies concerning this important poem, which explored in such critical studies
as those listed below, have crucial implications for
Beat poetry in general.