Personal Literary Narrative

In it’s uber-short blurb on this poem, Wikipedia says that “Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night” is “one of Thomas's most popular and accessible poems.” That’s probably why it was so popular and accessible to me:

Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night

Dylan Thomas

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.

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 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.

I think I first read it in a high school English class—maybe in Mr. What’s-his-WWI-loving-name’s class my sophomore year at Carmel High, or maybe with Mrs. Gouff of did-you-know-she’s-Mormon-and-goes-to-church-with-Jane fame my senior year, in preparation for the AP Lit test at Templeton High.

I think I read it again in either Dr. Westover’s class or Dr. Eastley’s class—or both. I get them mixed up because they were both entry-level BYU English classes, I took them both before my mission, and they were both taught by young-ish male faculty members whose names contain cardinal directions. I always wish that they would put your professors’ names on your transcript.

I read it again when the title refrain—the one that makes it a go-to textbook example of a villanelle—got stuck in my head, post-mission, I think. Do not go gentle into that good night. Rage, rage against the dying of the light. I like to ponder the paradox that form frees the poet.

But it’s like, what if I want to go gentle into that good night? What if Thomas’s expressed rage and passion against death actually make death come out on top here?

I thought of it again when I was on vacation with my family in August. We took a walk to the park and that refrain was stuck in my head again—I wish I could remember why. Maybe because we were talking about death. Or maybe my brother quoted it—he’s a random Tennyson fan and has a habit using his unrealized intelligence to store disconnected facts instead of dedicating said intelligence to his law classes. More likely I quoted it. But I always seems to remember it as “do not go gently,” which sounds better to me than “do not go gentle.”

In any case, I couldn’t remember who wrote it (do not go gentle into that good night), but I could remember its exact location on the page of my Norton Anthology and that I connected it for some reason with the complicated deaths of British boys during WWI and with All’s Quiet on the Western Front (speaking of awe/terror-evoking books…).

So we looked it up on the first accessible smart-phone. Probably my sister-in-law’s. And up popped “Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night” by Dylan Thomas. So I provided the small number of my immediate family that was not playing on the park swings at the moment and still listening to me (maybe two family members, maybe three if you count a sleeping infant) with some semi-fabricated context for the poem and a brief personal explication.

And my brother, Sam, said something like “Yeah, I get it. He’s saying we should fight until the end and not give in to death.” And I was like, “No he’s not.”

Because even though I think Sam’s partly right—after all, his perfunctory summation pretty well encompassed some much more scholarly explications of the poem—the repeated refrain isn’t the only part of this poem that gets stuck in my head. There’s something else there that’s too big for a “yeah, he’s saying ____” statement. Probably that something that we murder when we dissect. Something to do with death and literature and legacy and being remembered that you can’t put into an essay on your AP Lit exam or quite capture in any survey lit course. Something about not going gentle into that good night, but rage, raging against the dying of the light, or something else.