UNDERGRADUATE II YEAR SUBJECT: English Language & Poetry TOPIC: DO NOT GO GENTLE INTO THAT NIGHT Dylan Thomas LESSON MAP: 1.7.C.1 Duration: 30:32 min
Do Not Go Gentle Into That Night The Poet: Dylan Thomas, the son of a Professor of English,, was born in 1914, in Wales. (Show map) He grew up hearing his father recite Shakespeare to him, and from there was born a passion for the rhythms of English poetry. He dropped out of school at sixteen to become a junior reporter for the South Wales Daily Post. By December of 1932, he left his job at the Post and decided to concentrate on his poetry full time. It was during this time, in his late teens, that Thomas wrote more than half of his collected poems. Dylan wrote prolifically from a very young age, with his first poem being published in his school magazine. In 1934, when Thomas was twenty, he moved to London, won the Poet's Corner book prize, and published his first book, 18 Poems, to great acclaim. The book drew from a collection of poetry notebooks that Thomas had written years earlier, as would many of his most popular books. Sadly though, it was during this period of success, Thomas also began a habit of alcohol abuse. While his contemporaries T.S. Eliot and W.H Auden were writing at around the same time on social and intellectual themes, Dylan Thomas wrote in the Romantic tradition, poems that were highly charged with his intense emotionalism. Thomas himself admitted to this emotive component of his poems, stating that he let an Image be made emotionally in himself and then applied to it his intellect, only after it had first been formed by feeling it. So for Dylan Thomas, an image was birthed in his emotional being and then transferred to his intellect where he applied
to it the poetic craft and the outcome was such amazing poems as this one. Critics have commented that the poems are a product of his emotionality. Thomas often visited America, where he was very popular, on poetry-reading tours. (You can hear him read this poem on Youtube by clicking on to the link mentioned at the end of this lesson.) His flamboyant personality, his singing Welsh accent, his heavy drinking, and the tremendous depth of feeling with which he read, earned him the reputation of being the archetypal Romantic poet. It was in America that Dylan Thomas collapsed in a tavern after a long bout of drinking at the early age of 39. The poem: Now, let s take a closer look at the poem Do not go gentle into that night, which is considered to be one of Thomas finest works. It is a villanelle, which is a form of poetry borrowed from the French. A villanelle, typically is a poem that is 19 lines long, has a limited rhyming scheme of just 2 rhymes, and has a musical quality to it. The style of a villanelle includes the repetition of a refrain which is an idea or a saying, and this poem has two, which Thomas uses to reinforce the theme of the poem. They are: 1) Do not go gentle into that good night, and 2) Rage, rage against the dying of the light. Both refrains strongly suggest the poet s desperate desire that his father fight death and live on.
The poem has no title other than its first line, Do not go gentle into that good night, a line which appears as a refrain throughout the poem. Do not go gentle into that good night 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 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. 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.
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. When one has read the poem, one can understand the reasons for its popularity: everyone can identify with death. There is no one at whose door death does not knock. And secondly, everyone loves a message of encouragement, and in this poem, Dylan Thomas is attempting to do just that for his dying father- to give him strength and courage to fight off death. Thomas watched his father, formerly in the Army, grow weak and frail with old age. Thus, in his poem he tries to convince his father to fight against imminent death. He cites other men who have excelled in their respective fields: wise men, good men, wild men, or grave men ; men whose lives exemplified the best that they stood for, yet at the end, put up a brave fight against death. In this poem, Thomas makes an analysis of the emotions involved in death. Basically, there seem to be 2 schools of thought regarding why people do not wish to die and they will fight death with all their might until the end. The first states that regardless of the quality of life, Life is precious. One may be experiencing the lowest quality of life, or it may be poor, or average, and great, still Life is precious. And that s the reason people will hold on to it tenaciously.
Ex: loved one in a coma. Family members hesitate to take them off life-support. It shows that Life is of great value, even though the quality of that life is, at the present time, poor. Ex: person whose life became valuable when he became a father. He started to work hard to lose weight so he can be there for his daughter as she grew up. The second school of thought suggests that even though it is known that death is inevitable, all men put up a struggle against it, and this is not for the dying individual, but rather for those left behind. It is to bring comfort and closure to the loved ones that are bereaved. You might ask how this can be so Well, look at this way. The loved ones can imagine that the dying person loves them so much that he does not want to leave them, and hence he puts up this brave struggle against the inevitable. It has been historically stated that Dylan Thomas never showed this poem to his father. If this is true, then the poem was written more for his own benefit than his father s. As we had mentioned earlier that Thomas was highly emotional, perhaps the only way for him to deal with the emotional turmoil in his heart was to change those emotions into images, and words and then put them down on paper as a poem. Men from different walks of Life, all accorded great respect in society seem small and ineffectual when pitted against the Universe. Yet, they did not give up easily, Thomas suggests- they did not go gently into the night, they fought bravely against death. And yet, they did all die in the end. So it seems like a strange paradox that,
on the one hand, Thomas urges his father to put up this struggle, while on the other, he cites examples of different men who struggled likewise, but in the end, were vanquished by death. Speaking of the wise, Thomas says that they had been bestowed with a measure of wisdom. With their gift of wisdom, these wise men are able to disperse some of the darkness in the world in which they lived. Many average people, not as wise as them, would not have ever known the solutions they offered if not for their wisdom. They might have helped people understand many complex situations. Yet the light shed by them is insignificant compared to that which brightens up the sky when lightening strikes the earth. In that few seconds when lightening strikes, the world is day-light bright for a flash. There is such power in the Universe. Man s wisdom is nothing when compared to this power. In this dark and unhelpful world, there are very few good people. The good folk who do live try to do some good deeds but they appear weak attempts at goodness when compared to the earth. A good man may make waves but placed in the context of this huge expansive green bay, the planet earth, they are frail or negligible. The green stands for the bounty of the earth. The earth has given men in abundance- food, clothing, and the materials for shelter. What can man do that will compare to the goodness of the earth? It cannot be much! Wild and free spirited men imagined that their lives had made an impact on the sun, on Nature, but find out in old age, that Nature was grieved with them, that they could have held such a foolish idea! (That as men they could have any effect on Nature.)
Grave or serious men would have found out that their view of life was futile, because they would then have discovered that even those people who had serious handicaps like blindness could find room for joy in their lives. They had wasted their entire lives in being solemn, never experiencing joy and happiness, unlike those with much to be serious about. This paradoxical truth comes home to them when they reach the end of a life of great seriousness and gravity. The last quatrain is the most moving of all: Dylan Thomas implores his father, pleads with him, to do something, anything, that a living man would do, bless, curse, anything, just so he would do it. As both these actions, blessing and cursing imply an intensity that marks life, Thomas wishes his father would do either, and not simply slip into the silence of death. Thomas s father was an atheist. Perhaps out of respect to his beliefs, Thomas does not make use of any religious imagery in this poem that might otherwise to have been seen to bring comfort at such a time. In Do not go gentle into this night, there is a sense of the natural world as a spiritual force which is bigger than the individual man. It is said that at the time this poem was written, Dylan was facing more than one crisis in his life: not only was the death of his father imminent, but there was also a very real foreboding concerning the length of his own life. As his wife Caitlin notes in her memoirs, a sinister foreboding accompanied Dylan since his teenage years, when, after an illness, a doctor gave him four years to live. Also D.J. (his father) used to say that his son would not have reached the age of 40. This is probably the curse that Thomas refers to in line 17 of the poem. Dylan s father must have had his own fears from watching his son s increasing alcoholism. This
would have been extremely painful for the father, and doubly hurtful to the son. For the father, the pain would have stemmed from standing on the sidelines, watching his own son destroying his life with alcohol. For the son, the anguish would have come from what would have appeared to be harsh words from his own dad. Some critics say that Thomas mention of this fact in this poem might have been to achieve a cathartic effect, a purging from the deep hurt sustained from hearing those words. Catharsis is the term used to describe the need to bring out the deep feelings of hurt and pain. In speaking of them, one can be released and the soul purified. The poem ends on this ominous note leaving the reader with a heaviness that comes from the paradox that although the poet repeatedly urges his father not to go gently into death and to put up a fight, there is a sense of the Universe and its laws being greater and bigger and far more overwhelming than an individual s will. The power of the poem, Do not go gentle into that night lies in its straight forward approach to a universal theme and its simple structure and rhyme scheme. In this poem, Dylan Thomas displays his strength as a scholarly poet consciously working within the traditions that he had chosen to align himself with.