Respond to a Reading: Dylan Thomas, “Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night”
Read the poem “Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night” below and respond to the questions in the margin. When you are done, “submit” your response.
Dylan Thomas
(1914–1953)
Born in Swansea, Wales, Dylan Thomas decided to pursue a writing career directly after grammar school. At age twenty, he published his first collection, Eighteen Poems (1934), but his lack of a university degree deprived him of most opportunities to earn a living as a writer in England. Consequently, his early life (as well as the lives of his wife and children) was darkened by a poverty compounded by his free spending and heavy drinking. A self-proclaimed romanticist, Thomas called his poetry “a record of his struggle from darkness towards some measure of light.” The Map of Love appeared in 1939, and Deaths and Entrances in 1946. Later, as a radio playwright and screenwriter, Thomas delighted in the sounds of words, sometimes at the expense of sense. Under Milk Wood (produced in 1953) is filled with his private, onomatopoetic language. Thomas suffered from alcoholism and lung ailments and died in a New York hospital in 1953. Earlier that year, he noted in his Collected Poems: “These poems, with all their crudities, doubts and confusions are written for the love of man and in Praise of God, and I'd be a damn fool if they weren’t.”
The villanelle form is well suited to subject matter that has a repetitive or obsessive quality. It can feel like the poet is turning a problem over and over as the same ideas keep arising. How do the first and third lines in Thomas’ villanelle establish the subject matter and tone of the poem?
Why does Thomas use the adjective “gentle” instead of the adverb “gently” in the repeated line? Discuss the significance of this word choice.
“Blinding sight” is an example of a paradox, a seemingly self-contradictory phrase. Explain what “blinding sight” tells us about the vision of dying men. Where in the poem do you see other paradoxical phrases or ideas?
Thomas waits until the final stanza to reveal that the poem is addressed to—“my father.” How does your understanding of the poem change when you arrive at that line?
Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night
1
Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
Though wise men at their end know dark is right,
Because their words had forked no lightning they
2
Do not go gentle into that good night.
Good men, the last wave by, crying how bright
Their frail deeds might have danced in a green bay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
Wild men who caught and sang the sun in flight,
And learn, too late, they grieved it on its way,
Do not go gentle into that good night.
3
Grave men, near death, who see with blinding sight
Blind eyes could blaze like meteors and be gay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
4
And you, my father, there on the sad height,
Curse, bless, me now with your fierce tears, I pray.
Do not go gentle into that good night.
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
Dylan Thomas. "Do not go gentle into that good night" from The Poems of Dylan Thomas. Copyright © 1952 by Dylan Thomas. Reprinted by permission of New Directions Publishing Corp.