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This poem was written in 1951 by Dylan Thomas, when his father was dying and is one of his finest works. It is a villanelle, a poetic form which entered English-language poetry in the 1800s from the imitation of French models. The word derives from the Italian villanella. A villanelle has only two rhyme sounds. The first and third lines of the first stanza are rhyming refrains that alternate as the third line in each successive stanza and form a couplet at the close. A villanelle is nineteen lines long, consisting of five tercets and one concluding quatrain. In music, it is either an instrumental piece or a dance form accompanied by sung lyrics.

 

 

1. What is the rhyme scheme of the poem? Which are the words that rhyme?

2. What is the theme of the poem? What does ‘that good night’ mean?

3. The first line of the poem is repeated several times: does it always refer to the same person?

4. When is it a statement and when an imperative?

5. What is the poet’s attitude to death: regret, rage, grief, despair, acceptance, joy, happiness?

6. Which lines / words express his feelings?

 

 

 

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 have 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.

 

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.

 

And you, my father, there on your sad height,

Curse, bless me now with four fierce tears, I pray.

Do not go gentle into that good night.

Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

 

 

Dylan Marlais Thomas (1914-1953) was a Welsh poet and writer. He loved the wild landscape of his native Wales, and he put much of his childhood and youth into his stories. He wrote a few dozen poems and stories, a ‘play for voices’, Under Milk Wood, and scripts for film and radio, which he often performed himself. His public readings, particularly in America, won him great acclaim.

Dylan Thomas was considered a great surrealist poet. He acknowledged his debt to James Joyce and Sigmund Freud. He was passionate and intense, and used fantastic imagery of the subconscious in his verse.

He wrote that he became a poet because he “had fallen in love with words”. His sense of the richness and variety and flexibility of the English language shines through all of his work. His pages are dotted with invented words and puns (the use of two or more words that sound the same, usually for humorous purposes).

Dylan Thomas's life and work have made him a legendary figure in the decades since his death, amidst alcohol and debts, in New York at the age of thirty-nine.

 

 

 

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