And death shall have no dominion

And death shall have no dominion.
Dead men naked they shall be one
With the man in the wind and the west moon;
When their bones are picked clean and the clean bones gone,
They shall have stars at elbow and foot;
Though they go mad they shall be sane,
Though they sink through the sea they shall rise again;
Though lovers be lost love shall not;
And death shall have no dominion.

And death shall have no dominion.
Under the windings of the sea
They lying long shall not die windily;
Twisting on racks when sinews give way,
Strapped to a wheel, yet they shall not break;
Faith in their hands shall snap in two,
And the unicorn evils run them through;
Split all ends up they shan't crack;
And death shall have no dominion.

And death shall have no dominion.
No more may gulls cry at their ears
Or waves break loud on the seashores;
Where blew a flower may a flower no more
Lift its head to the blows of the rain;
Though they be mad and dead as nails,
Heads of the characters hammer through daisies;
Break in the sun till the sun breaks down,
And death shall have no dominion.

Finally got to watch the end of Lost last night. I’m pretty sure that, like Topsy, the series ‘just growed’, the writers having no idea where it was going when they began series one. Given that, the finale was reasonably satisfying. A couple of series ago I toyed with the idea that the island was Purgatory and I don’t think I was too far off the mark. It certainly seemed to be about redemption and showing, as Larkin put it:

Our almost instinct, almost true
What will survive of us is love.

Telegraph review Guardian review BBC review

A couple of nights before we’d watched the finale of Flash Forward. Given that the series was a dramatisation of a novel I’d expected something coherent and satisfying. It wasn’t. Looking on the web produced the answer: ABC had pulled the plug on the programme because viewing figures had plummeted by two-thirds in the States. The last episode was the finale only in name. In reality it was simply the last one to be screened. Unless someone makes the show more viewer-friendly for American audiences by rewriting the script to exclude words of more than one syllable, I guess I’ll have to read the novel to find out what finally happened.