do not go gentle into that good night full poem

Thomas refuses this concession because the subject is his father, and he cannot bear to see his once strong parent as impotent and shriveling in his final months.Īt the end of the first stanza he urges his father to “Rage, rage against the dying of the light”, again choosing a word (“rage”) that evokes an image of furious, even violent intensity.

Thomas knows that death is unavoidable, even “good”, but he does not concede that meekness must precede it. The son is seeing his father slowly wither before him, and he mourns the loss of vibrancy in the old man. Yet for the author, this seemingly senseless display is preferable to docile submission to the “close of day”. The choice of the words “burn” and “rave” suggest an uncontrolled, irrational response to imminent death, the incoherent expenditure of useless energy directed at a hopeless goal. The poet begins by proposing that the elderly should not easily accept their demise (“go gentle”), that they should fight it with vigor and intensity (“Old age should burn and rave at the close of day”). The two lines repeated in this work are “Rage, rage against the dying of the light” and “Do not go gentle into that good night.” A villanelles uses only two rhymes, while repeating two lines throughout the poem, which then appear together at the conclusion of the last stanza. A villanelles is 19 lines long, consisting of five stanzas of three lines each and concluding with a four line stanza. This poem is one of the most famous villanelles every written in the English language. the onset of night, or as it is used here, death. He urges his father to “Rage, rage against the dying of the light,” i.e. In “Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night,” poet Dylan Thomas uses nighttime as a metaphor for death, and anguishes over his father’s willing acceptance of it. In the 2014 film Interstellar, the poem is quoted frequently by Michael Caine’s character, Professor John Brand, while Matthew McConaughey and Anne Hathaway are sent into hyper sleep with the words, “Do not go gentle into that good night.On 'Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night' In the 1996 film Independence Day, the president gives a rousing speech to his bedraggled army as they prepare to fight the aliens, saying “We will not go quietly into the night.” Thomas’s best known poem has been referenced frequently in popular culture. Their frail deeds might have danced in a green bay, Good men, the last wave by, crying how bright Though wise men at their end know dark is right,īecause their words had forked no lightning they Rage, rage, against the dying of the light. Old age should burn and race at close of day

Please search for the full poem in an anthology or at your local library. Due to copyright restrictions, I cannot reproduce the whole poem here.

Do not go gentle into that good night full poem