Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night: Writing against Mortality with Dylan Thomas

In this week’s episode of Beyond the Verse, the official podcast of PoemAnalysis.com and Poetry+, Joe and Maiya unpack Dylan Thomas’s iconic villanelle, 'Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night.' Written in 1947 and published in 1951, this powerful plea to resist mortality remains one of the most famous poems of the 20th century.

Joe and Maiya explore how Thomas’s poetic form—strict yet expressive—mirrors the poem’s defiant message. They trace the emotional roots of the piece in Thomas’s personal life, particularly the declining health of his father, and examine the deeper cultural backdrop of post-WWII grief. From the poem’s bold address to archetypes like wise men and wild men, to the ambiguity of “gentle” vs “gently,” the discussion reveals how Thomas wrestles with legacy, loss, and the human impulse to fight against the inevitable.

Get exclusive PDFs on 'Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night' available to Poetry+ users:

• Full PDF Guide
• Poetry Snapshot PDF
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  • with meter
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• Dylan Thomas PDF Guide

Tune in and discover:

• Why the villanelle form intensifies the poem’s emotional power
• How Thomas balances personal grief with universal themes
• What makes this poem a striking counterpoint to wartime poetry
• How Thomas’s refusal to conform shaped both his fame and critical legacy

Transcript

Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night: Writing against Mortality with Dylan Thomas (Transcript)
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[00:00:00] 

Maiya: 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 learned 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 [00:01:00] 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.

Joe: Welcome to Beyond the Verse a poetry podcast brought to you by the team at PoemAnalysis.com and Poetry+ I'm Joe and I'm here with my co host Maiya and today we're going to be discussing the poem that Maiya has just beautifully read for us, Dylan Thomas's Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night, and we're going to be discussing a range of themes including the impact of poetic structure, writing against mortality, and the myth of the poet.

But before we get into the poem itself, Maiya, can you tell us a little bit more about Dylan Thomas as an individual, where he came from, a little bit about his life?

Maiya: Of course, thanks Joe. So Dylan Thomas was born in 1914 in Swansea, which is a seaside town in Wales. He attended a grammar school but was generally a sickly child. He spent a lot of time at home with his mother and father. and his father was an English teacher. This is where he gets his love of poetry from.

He started [00:02:00] writing as a teenager and was first published in the New English Weekly in 1933, aged just 19, and a year later released his first collection, 18 Poems, that's in 1934, , where he then moved to London to pursue his writing career. During the 1940s, during World War II, he worked for the BBC as a script writer, but he died in 1953, aged only 39, from heavy drinking. Now that is a very quick pit stop tour of his life, but Joe, I'd love to know from you, what do we know about Thomas that kind of influenced his life as a poet?

Where does the poem we're talking about today come from?

Joe: Thanks, Maiya. So as you mentioned in that brief biography, Dylan Thomas achieved poetic success at a very young age. In fact, a large majority of the poems that went on to become the canon of Dylan Thomas were written when he was in his early twenties. This poem is much later.

He began writing the poem in 1947 when he was on a trip to Florence in Italy. And the poem, as we're going to discuss [00:03:00] later on, is inspired by his own father's failing health. On the one hand, he's very drawn to Welsh mythology, Especially the famous collection of Welsh prose stories known as the Mabinogion.

But he was also drawing upon contemporary figures, so he was an enormous fan of the likes of James Joyce French poet Arthur Rimbaud from the 19th century. Like lots of writers in the 20th century, he's also engaging in different forms of cultural analysis and psychological analysis and he was influenced by the writing of Sigmund Freud, for example, so he's really drawing on several different strands of cultural and literary life. 

Most people will be aware of Dylan Thomas's poetry for its vivid use of language, its use of wordplay, its use of rhyme. It's really verbally dense, especially his early poetry, and sometimes Those factors blur some of the more interesting things that his poetry is doing in terms of drawing on those myriad influences.

But to answer your question, Maiya, this poem, we're talking late 40s, and of course any poem about mortality like this one that's written in the late 40s must be viewed in the context of the horrors of the Second [00:04:00] World War in which millions of people were killed. We're going to be diving into the poem now.

And Maiya, I know you want to talk about form, and for any listeners who aren't aware, this poem is written as a villanelle. So, Maiya, can you tell us a little bit more about what that means?

Maiya: Absolutely. So a villanelle is a 19 line, very highly structured poem. It contains a lot of repeated lines, you have the repetition of do not go gentle into that good night, the dying of the light, all of these kind of lean into that villanelle.

However, the specific structure is written in five tercets, which are five sets of three lines, and it ends with a final quatrain, and that is a four line stanza. Now, what I think is really important to note here is that with a villanelle, it does an incredible job of actually telling a story without even looking at the content. Now If you were to solely take the repetition of those tercets, the repetition of those stanzas, you would have what is effectively a rolling poem.

You would have something that doesn't really have an end. The [00:05:00] quatrain at the end, however, not only changes the form, but gives us a sense of finality. These four lines and the final rhyming couplet Offers a sense of finality that we haven't had at any other point in this poem.

And I really love the fact that when a lot of poets talk about death, it can often be seen as this very abstract and not quite material thing. But Thomas does an amazing job of making it very visceral and very real. And I think the form just adds to that. But what do you think, Joe?

Joe: Well I completely agree, and when writers, particularly 20th and 21st century writers, when they employ a strict form like this, I'm always curious about the justification because, worth noting that in the 20th century, especially by the time this poem was written, free verse had become the dominant form of poetry.

Not everybody, there was a movement back against the rise of free verse in the 20s and 1910s that sought to restore what they viewed as proper poetry by returning to more traditional fixed, rhyming, and metrical forms , [00:06:00] but Thomas could absolutely have written this in free verse.

The reason he didn't, therefore, becomes really significant, and what I find fascinating about this is he's taking a poem that is ultimately about resistance, that is about fighting against the inevitable, but he's laid it out in a poem that has incredibly strict parameters.

the villanelle form has a place where it has to go. You are quite limited in what you can do as a poet. You are limited by only being able to use two types of rhymes, there's only A and B rhymes in this poem 

The poem’s subject matter is about fighting back against something you ultimately cannot defeat, but nevertheless have a kind of moral imperative to resist. And what the form of the poem means that we see that same battle taking place, because The words that Thomas is using are resisting and fighting against really strict confines.

And I think that's a wonderful way of thinking about what the poem is doing. Because ultimately, Thomas narrator knows that their father, who the poem is addressed to, cannot defeat death. It's not about overcoming anything, it's simply about the value [00:07:00] in lasting a little longer against overwhelming odds.

Maiya: And just to add to that with the repetition of certain lines, we see an even more constricted view of this poem. If you ignore the repeated lines, Thomas has only really had about ten lines of this poem to convey the idea that he really wants to put forward.

That in itself can serve almost to imprison ideas, but instead what we have here is Thomas really using the limited space that he has to branch out and explore this very tough topic to talk about. 

So what I'd like to do is jump straight into the poem, and as any regular listeners will know , there are some poems that we like to go through kind of line by line and explore the poem and how it develops. This one I would like to begin right at the start, , 

in the second line we have this idea that old age should burn and rave at close of day. I think this is a really interesting line because so often in poetry, and in fact in some of Thomas earlier poetry, we see older generations, we see age as almost a passive and [00:08:00] slightly lighter description. But here it is active . It should burn and rave. But what do you think this sort of resistance here really means to Thomas? What do you think this conveys to the reader from, the outset of the poem?

Joe: Well, It's a really good question, and I think it's doing several things at once all great poets are able to do. On the one hand, I want to just remind readers that at this stage of the poem, these opening lines, it's not clear who, if anybody, is actually dying. It's only in the final stanza that we really get revealed to us that this is a poem addressed personally to the narrator's father.

At this stage of the poem, we don't know whether the narrator themselves are the ones who are dying. We don't know whether they are the people we don't know whether they are the person experiencing old age. It really changes the way I read these lines once you finish the poem to go back.

I remember reading this poem for the first time and finding those lines really resonate differently once you have that context. Because if this person is able to speak to their father, who is an old man, It implies that they are not old themselves, or at least, you can [00:09:00] extrapolate. Obviously, there's no way of knowing necessarily how old this narrator is in relation to their father, but we can assume they're much younger.

So these views about old age are being expressed by somebody who is not themselves old. And I think that's a really interesting thing to be aware of. , this is all about rooting the poem in its context, which maybe sounds odd because this poem does feel so universal.

We all die and most of us, thankfully, do get to reach old age and in many ways it speaks to really universal themes. The reason for that is, as we mentioned, the poem was written in 1947. So we're talking just two years after the conclusion of the Second World War in which millions of people had been killed.

It goes without saying that the majority of those millions of people were soldiers and therefore were young men in particular. So this notion of old age being something we can all expect, which is a view that many of us might hold in the 21st century, was absolutely not a given.

Millions of young men had been denied the right to ever grow old because of the horrors of the Second World War. So I always read that line as a challenge to those who are lucky enough to grow old, that it's not something that should be embraced [00:10:00] passively, as Maiya mentioned earlier on. And that's one of the things about this poem that's so deeply subversive is it takes our expectations of old age, which we might associate with wisdom, but also with grace and with gentleness.

It's a complete rejection of those things. Thomas is saying, millions of people never got the right to grow old gracefully and meekly accept their eventual demise. You have a, kind of responsibility to those people to fight, to resist, to cling on to breath and life for as long as you possibly can.

But, what do you think, Maiya?

Maiya: One of the things that I find incredibly interesting about, especially this descriptor is that very often when we address wartime poems, especially from people based in the UK, you're looking at a primarily Christian readership. Now, the Christian framework that is set up when we talk about death is so often approaching the light. The moment at which you die, you walk towards the light.

It is interpreted as Your entrance to heaven. Here, having Thomas repel that light, the dying of the [00:11:00] light we have a bit of a reversal here that I always find quite unusual when set against that kind of moment of passing.

Instead of having a light that is welcoming warm and bright you have a light that instead threatening and I think, you know, we've talked about this in many previous episodes about the importance of the sun, and I massively recommend to anyone who's listening to this episode to also listen to the episode we did on Chinua Achebe's Love Cycle because we talk a lot about how the sun is mythologized in that.

The fact that it is something that is being taken away from the reader. And I think what Thomas does really excellently here is actually just supplement the anxiety and the fear that can surround that moment of death.

We get a very fresh perspective towards the end of this poem where we understand that it's written from a very personal point of view. It's a son writing to a father. And of course there's a level of fear and terror here. You know, I think what Joe said about, you have to read this poem twice to really understand it, absolutely stands, [00:12:00] because as you go through this poem and you can pick out where those specific anxieties are, I think it tracks very well that light here is not imbued with goodness and kindness, but it instead is something that, the speaker is terrified of, they don't want to lose their father regardless of whether they're going to a more positive place.

Joe: I love that and I'm sure we're going to talk more about this in the second half of this episode when we talk about the kind of the myth of Thomas and his reluctance to align himself, his reluctance to offer certainty. But we see that absolutely in this first answer because Maiya's absolutely right.

Talking about the dying of the light, talking about death as this final end really stands at odds with a Christian readership or even a readership who might be secular but as many people in the West are kind of rooted in a Christian tradition. And yet the opening line specifically tells us it is a good night.

So there's this real ambiguity about whether this is an end, or whether this is a new beginning, or whether there is an afterlife awaiting the father, or not. Now, the brilliance of this ambiguity is that it's the [00:13:00] same ambiguity that all of us have. even devout Christians, experience moments of doubt about whether or not there is a Christian heaven and the same with people who believe in other faiths and the same with people who believe in no God at all, even people who do not believe there is an afterlife , might find themselves hoping there is one.

For themselves or for their loved ones as a means of comforting and the ambiguity in these opening lines the uncertainty the kind of Oscillating between implying that there is an afterlife and there isn't one is one of the things that makes this poem about mortality feel so genuine because those are exactly the kind of apprehensions and concerns and worries that people have themselves when they or loved ones are dying

Because in those moments our ignorance is no obstacle to hope. We hope for the best for our loved ones and for ourselves, but we play games with ourselves about whether or not we actually believe there is anything good about the night to come. Whether there is simply impending darkness, or whether there might be some kind of salvation in the form of light.

Maiya: I'm really glad you brought up about the myth of Thomas as well because, just to briefly move on to the second stanza , though [00:14:00] 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. I have always interpreted that stanza in particular to be more about legacy and an inspiration. And I find this descriptor of, you know, that moment of inspiration as a fork of lightning.

A flash in the otherwise Dark life. Really fascinating. I think it's such an interesting way to describe any form of making a difference or making a point or being remembered for something. And what Thomas is saying here is that if you haven't had that moment where you've proved yourself to the world, where you've had something that someone can remember you by then you can't.

Pass on. You can't take that next step. Joe and I were talking before the podcast episode about how Thomas is a slightly odd figure when you look at the poetic scene generally, because though he was immensely popular, especially in the U. S. And I think, Joe, you mentioned he was the UK's 10th favourite poet in a more recent survey. But when it comes to, [00:15:00] us doing our research before the episode and really exploring that, I certainly hadn't ever seen Thomas as, this absolutely famous poet, a must read. I knew of his work I knew of him, but.

It seems that other poets that, Joe and I both like and admire, have much more reverence for his work. So, when we talk about legacy in a poem that is about death, I almost find this stanza a little offensive on a second read, because when it's written to his father, what I almost translate this as, you haven't done enough to pass yet, you can't leave me. But what that really is again that fear playing into it. So the myth of Thomas and how his legacy is leaked into a lot of the work that we read. I almost don't see the man and the poet here. I see that kind of scared little boy more so. And I think that comes out much more strongly in this poem than in a lot of the other poems that we can read of Thomas's.

Joe: yeah, I mean, we were talking before the episode about reading this poem as a bit of a companion piece with one of Thomas's other most famous poems, which is And Death Shall Have No Dominion, which was [00:16:00] written much earlier, written in 1933 as a competition with a fellow poet and friend of his, Bert Trick.

And yet one of the key differences that I see is That kind of, you're right, the evocation of that small child, that kind of really sincere fear that you feel in this poem, this apprehension about being left alone in the world. And I think what this poem is able to do is, and I mentioned this when we're talking about the first stanza, is it captures something authentic about the experience of having a loved one pass away while being applicable to countless other loved ones.

And maybe those two things are different sides of the same coin. Because there's something about Thomas's ability to balance the personal and the universal that makes this poem so enduringly appealing to people. And it's a really strange poem. It's considered by many to be a funeral poem. And yet in some ways it feels completely at odds with what we tend to imagine about the end of life and it's so provocative in that way it's so Inflammatory and I [00:17:00] think that there is a real honesty about that inflammatory nature. I mean how many people put on a face and pretends that actually oh, no, you know It's my time or it's the time of my loved one And what actually there is a kind of inner child in us that screams no, you know I don't want my loved one to pass away I don't I'm not ready for my father or my mother or my friend and there's a real urgency and intensity to this poem that I think speaks to those feelings, even if they're feelings that we wish we weren't having.

Maiya: Absolutely, I couldn't agree more. And I think, again, just to root back to this whole mythology piece we're talking about, one of the things that is so enduring about the kind of mythology around Thomas, if you want to call it that, is the fact that he never really subscribed to any manifestos, he wasn't part of literary movements, he never really fell into one of those brackets. And I think, Joe, I'd love know if you agree or not, but I think a lot of the time when we do have those literary movements, it becomes very easy for us when we analyse as readers, to almost shoehorn sometimes and say, okay, well, this [00:18:00] phrasing is because they were a modernist, or this phrasing is because they were a romantic poet.

Whereas, because Thomas had very few affiliations in this sense, it makes it really touching to read a poem that really has nowhere else to go. This poem is absolutely stand alone in so many ways, other than to relate to Thomas's other work. And I think , as you said, when it is provocative and a little bit unsettling in a way, that just adds to this sense that it's an absolutely individual poem.

And although, yes, it speaks to a greater sense of loss. Ultimately, this is one person's poem about their singular relationship with their father and the fear of losing that person and losing that loved one. Again, I think all of this feeds into just his absolute sense of individuality.

Joe: Yeah and we're going to talk more about this in the second half of today's episode, about how certain decisions that Thomas made in his life, actually away from the poetry and away from the drama itself, shapes the way those poems and those dramas are [00:19:00] viewed today. I mean, for any listeners who haven't already checked out our episode on Sylvia Plath, I really implore you to do that because it was a really interesting conversation that covered not just individual poems of hers, but also the space she occupies in the public conversation.

And you know, Thomas has achieved a similar kind of mythology. I mean as recently as another episode I would plug for listeners our interview we did in December with Kristie Frederick-Daugherty and the collection she edited where poets responded to the songs of Taylor Swift because Taylor Swift namedropped Dylan Thomas in her most recent album where she mentioned him alongside the likes of Patti Smith and talked about the Chelsea Hotel which maybe we'll get on to in the second half as well. This kind of sense that he is a larger than life figure and people know Dylan Thomas's name even if they can't name a Dylan Thomas poem.

Now what that does to the work itself and the way the work is perceived is absolutely fascinating and I think in some ways, it allows his poetry, as Maiya mentioned, to be kind of free of ideological shackles. You know, he's not having to write poetry because he believes that poetry should be a certain way, as many other 20th [00:20:00] century poets were.

Again, I would suggest listeners go and check out our most recent episode on T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land, if you want a really interesting companion piece about a poet who is also carrying an ideology on his back. Thomas is free of those kind of responsibilities. And yet there is a dark side to that as well because when you are so reluctant to align yourself with any kind of school of thought or any kind of particular identity as a poet, sometimes that means that you can be a little bit tetherless in the conversation because ultimately all artists legacies are not decided by them, they're decided by others.

Now Thomas has achieved massive public renown, very well known amongst the public. And actually, maybe there's a chance that's hindered some of his critical reception. you know, there are a great many scholars who are doing great work on Dylan Thomas, but he is not held in the same kind of esteem in academic circles as some of his contemporaries. And I'm fascinated as to why that is. my view is that his reluctance to align himself not just literary movements, but Dylan Thomas is a Welsh poet and is in [00:21:00] many ways one of Wales's greatest ever writers. And yet He was quite dismissive of quite a lot of Welsh issues, and particularly the idea of Welsh nationalism. He was very caustic in his view of what Welsh nationalism represented, and his views on whether or not he thought it was a good idea.

And, that makes it harder to view him in the Welsh context, because, yes, he is a great poet from Wales, but whether or not you have to align yourself with certain national values in order to be considered a great poet of the nation, not merely from the nation, is another question. I'm fascinated about him as an individual.

His utter reluctance to be pigeonholed, his refusal to be viewed in this light or the other, on the one hand really helps him in individual poems, but possibly hinders him when you view his legacy as a whole. But, what do you think about that, Maiya? 

Maiya: I think that's a really interesting take, actually, Joe, and I hadn't really considered the broader impact of that refusal, but I think you're right.

When I think about Thomas, I don't necessarily think about, Thomas, I think about a very particular era in his life. I feel like there was three [00:22:00] very distinct sections to Thomas life.

One being his young life, his popularity, and then his kind of quiet end, in a weird sort of sense. There is a real sense that you can take, his best years and almost sort of package them up. And that is the perfect Thomas that is. Put out to the public. As you mentioned he was incredibly well known, especially in the US for touring his poems. He was well renowned for being a pioneer of reigniting the spark of oral poetry and performance. That is why he is so well loved, especially in the US, but. In the UK, I think there's always been a little bit controversial, but I think in the UK, especially when it comes to poetry, there's a little bit more reverence for rules and form, to be honest. I think there's a lot of poets that are part of our canon that are famous because of how they write. As a manifesto, for example. Exactly like you said, with T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land. It is this incredibly dense, long poem that is written to say something to make a [00:23:00] point. And I think because Thomas doesn't necessarily conform in society, even though we see incredible examples like Do Not Go Gentle, where he has this real tension when it comes to exploring form. Using a villanelle is quite literally one of the hardest poems to write.

I have tried to do it and it is so tough. There's just not the same reverence for him in the UK and I do wonder where that comes from but I think you did an excellent explainer of potentially the reasons why. 

Joe: Now, by happy coincidence, our 25th episode of Beyond the Verse, which we did on Sylvia Plath's poetry, also coincided with the day in which we analysed our 5000th poem on PoemAnalysis.com. Yes, 5000 poems. So, what I would suggest to any listeners, who want to explore more about poetry, who are enjoying the podcast, is go to PoemAnalysis.com, sign up for a Poetry+ membership, which will give you access to all of the [00:24:00] materials that accompany those 5, 000 analysed poems. We've talked about this in previous episodes of the podcast, but just to quickly run through some of the member benefits, we have a weekly newsletter, written by yours truly, in which we go through key poetic news, book recommendations, and much more.

We have bespoke resources available to Poetry+ members, including a PDF learning library on which has more than 300 PDFs on all kind of elements of poetry, including individual poets, form, symbols and imagery within poetry, and lots more.

Not to mention the fact that you can access tons of bonus materials that are on those articles I mentioned, more than 5, 000 articles on different poems that are exclusively available to Poetry+ members.

For those of you who are enjoying the podcast and can't wait for us to get to 5, 000 episodes, you can go and read about 5, 000 poems right now at PoemAnalysis.com. 

So just to continue the conversation we were having before the break, I'm really interested in the opening lines of some of these stanzas, because you [00:25:00] mentioned earlier on, stanza two begins with, The wise men and the following three stanzas we get references to good men in stanza three, wild men in stanza four, and grave men in stanza five.

And, Thomas is exploring about how all of these men react differently to Their ends to impending death and I just wonder Why do you think he structures it in this way? Why these different? archetypal male figures wise grave, etc What is he trying to say about the universality of death and the way that different kinds of people meet it?

Maiya: It's a really great question, Joe. I think it's, that first point you mentioned about the universality piece, I think that is really at the core of this poem. Because, of course, as you mentioned, on a first reading we don't understand who the intended recipient of this poem really is. The poem is made up of, let's not forget, commands.

Do not go. Rage against. I personally believe the reason we don't find out who the recipient of this poem is until the very end is because Thomas wants to focus on the universality. As you [00:26:00] noted in the first part of this podcast. Death is a universal experience for every single person on this earth, whether it's, close family or friends. You know, the old saying is, one of the only sure things in life is death. And I think using these very different archetypal male figures is a really interesting choice from Thomas because of course, as we mentioned in that second stanza, You look at a wise man who feels as if they've had no real moment of inspiration or no legacy to leave behind.

I think the reason that Thomas uses these very different but very archetypal male figures is, again, to show this universality, but also to really demonstrate that. No matter what type of person you are, there's never going to be an absolutely perfect way to pass on.

The wise men don't think that they had enough inspiration, they don't feel like they left enough of a legacy. The good men in this poem feel as if all of the good deeds they've done in their life are frail. The wild men sought to be wilder, they didn't think that they'd done enough. And the [00:27:00] grave men are given blinding sight, they are given foresight, they are given clarity. And yet, it still doesn't feel like enough. There is absolutely no fulfilment in any of these lines. And I think as we mentioned earlier, the form helps that because we have tercets, yes we have the rhyme of right and night, bright and light, flight and night. But there really doesn't seem to be this sense of completion because we immediately move on to the next stanza. All of these people, all of these subjects in the poem are left wanting. And personally, I find one of the more enduringly powerful parts of this poem, is that living or dead or on the brink of serious illness, there is always a wanting, there's always more to be had.

And I think what I find at the end of the poem, and what I take from Thomas's writing, is that regardless of the wanting, regardless of the desire that's left at the end, you have to come to peace with it. Because you're never going to do enough, you're never going to do everything you set out to accomplish, you are going to be Driving for more, [00:28:00] driving for better, and that's just life.

You can do the most amazing thing and potentially still feel like there was more to be done. That doesn't negate your success. That doesn't mean that your life has no worth, if anything. It's the wanting that makes it worth it. It's the wanting that drives you to be more, to do more, to be better.

And I love that, after all of these generalizations, The wise men, the good men, the wild men, the grave men, you're left with his father who has the ability to both curse and bless Thomas, who is, after all of these slightly more abstracted ideas, becomes a really concrete piece of this poem, becomes a figure to really tether the reader to, but that's what I think, and I'd love to know your thoughts

Joe: I'm enthralled listening to that was really wonderful. Thank you, Maiya. There's so much to say let me try and distill these thoughts. I think the first thing that it reminds you of is what you mentioned earlier on and what we've been saying really the whole episode, which is the fact that this is the fate for us all, wise, grave, good, [00:29:00] bad, ugly, handsome, we all die.

I'm caught a mind of that line, I think it's From Hamlet, how a king may go a progress through the guts of a beggar. The idea that regardless of your earthly qualities, the earth is the ultimate destination. The next thing I want to talk about with these different descriptions of the men is Again, that word ambiguity, because you're right, we get these different versions of men and what men are, there are good men, there are great men, etc. And then we get the father and there is a real sense of ambiguity about, which of these categories does this person fall into?

Which of them, if any, are appropriate to describe the narrator's father? And the poem doesn't give us a clear cut answer of that, and maybe that's Thomas kind of playing with this notion of distilling people into these categories anyway. And this really strikes at the core of something I find about this poem that really interests me, and it's not something I noticed on first reading, I first read this poem years ago, and it was only really in preparation for this episode that I started thinking about this, which is that we all have a tendency when people die to try to distill them, [00:30:00] to try and characterize them, to try and capture something of their essence.

I mean, anybody who's ever attended a funeral knows that, when people talk about their loved one, their friend, their family member who's passed away. They tend to talk about them as this kind of permanent enshrined thing. This is what the story of their life added up to. They were kind, they were generous. those things cease to become things that person did and they become who that person was. And I think that this poem really captures something of our human tendency to oversimplify, to distill. The men in this poem are not doing things wisely or gravely. Or in a kind or generous manner. Those are adjectives.

They become who those people were, not simply how they conducted themselves. And for me the ultimate clue that this is the kind of. tendency that Thomas is exploring is in that title, in that opening line, that refrain, do not go gentle into that good night. No mention of do not go gently, because of [00:31:00] course , in most uses of language that would be an adverb, not an adjective.

Going is something you do gently, it's not something you are, and yet I think there's something about that sliding doors moment of life and death where the actions that we perform in life become the people we were when we were alive and the way we did those actions become something innate about our personhood and I find that ability that Thomas has to Shine a light on something that we all do.

We're all guilty of doing this. I mean, read any obituary for any famous person or any, funeral that you've ever attended for anyone that you knew personally. We all have a tendency to stamp characteristics onto people's lives. Rather than acknowledge that during life, we're capable of behaving both wisely and stupidly or kindly and unkindly.

And ultimately, our multifaceted nature kind of gets flattened out when we view an entire life. And I it's so impressive to me that Thomas is able to do that without making it. the kind of overarching point of the poem. He just includes it as part of [00:32:00] that process we all undergo when somebody is dying and for me that speaks to the authenticity that lies beneath the clarity of this poem.

Maiya: That was really well put, Joe. Thank you. I also think maybe remiss of us to not address this in the first instance, but the difference between gently and gentle makes all of the difference in this poem. On reflection, this is a poem written not for people. Who have reached old age and are ready to pass on, who have felt that they have lived their life.

It is a poem for the young people they leave behind. It's full of youth and vitality and rage and power and strength. but here, where gentle is a descriptor, where it's an adjective used to describe the person who is passing, it suggests that they are at peace with this moment. They are ready to go gentle. They are simply that. As you mentioned, they are distilled down into this slight gentleness, this peace, this relative happiness. You know, gentle is not a descriptor that is, weak, as you [00:33:00] said, to distill a whole person down into one singular descriptor is a human tendency, but also very powerful when you think about it.

There is so much to be said for the fact that this poem can also be framed In the view of war, there were so many young men going to war to fight with rage and hatred and anger and frustration and all of these more negative or fierce emotions, in this final stanza, your fierce tears, everything comes from this very strong rooted emotion, but to contrast it to a man who is at the end of his life, Who has lived his life as he sees fit, who is ready to pass on.

And again, we see this in the difference, the sad height that the father stands on. I almost see this as a pedestal moment. The younger son is looking up at his father and saying, There is so much growth to be had between the person that I am now and the person that I might be at the end. And Maybe the reason that Thomas is unwilling or not ready to [00:34:00] accept the father's passing is because he doesn't have the experience of life.

He doesn't have the experience of living through what his father has lived through. So, gentle is, such a quietly powerful word in this poem that I think, remiss of us perhaps not to have mentioned it in the first instance. But when we think, about that central tension, the relationship between the father and the son and the difference between being gentle and being fierce, where does that situate the reader in all of this? What are we left with at the close of the poem?

Joe: Well for me, this is testament to the poem's ability to do this, for me it depends on where the reader themselves are in. Cards on the table, speaking as a 27 year old person, so I don't think I count as in old age just yet. But I imagine that reading this poem as an older person, it's possible to take kind of a level of inspiration from it, this idea that yes, I will push on, yes, I will reject the oncoming kind of frailty that we associate with old age, but I could also Imagine an elderly person saying, hang on a minute, someone in their thirties wrote this poem.

What the hell do they know about growing old? And likewise I can imagine [00:35:00] somebody, who is in sort of the position of the narrator where it's their parent or their grandparent that is growing old or perhaps imminently about to die. And I can imagine that person really feeling the passion that Thomas is expressing here, really feeling that, no, you must push on, you have a responsibility to push on, you have an imperative to push on, even if that feeling is ultimately a selfish one, because whether or not the narrator wants their father to push on for their father's sake, or actually because they don't want to confront their father's death themselves, is another question.

But I can equally imagine somebody feeling really perturbed by this poem because we e don't want to think of our loved ones, parents, grandparents, in their final moments as being fighting or as being rageful. We like to think of them at peace, but again, who is that feeling for? Is that because we want them to be at peace or we are comforted by the fact we tell ourselves they were at peace. So the brilliance of the poem is I think you can have people from different walks of life, people of different ages, people who have vastly different outlooks on the world, who can all take something from this poem.

Whether it's embodying the poem or whether it's defining yourself in opposition. to the [00:36:00] spirit of this poem. And that for me is really powerful. But I've got a question for you, Maiya.

How important is it for this poem, but also for Thomas more generally, that he didn't get to reach old age.

He died at 39 as you've mentioned and given this poem and others of his are so concerned with mortality and death and old age, what does that say about the poetry and do you think it changes the way the poetry is perceived?

Maiya: In short, yes, I think it absolutely changes the way that his poems are perceived. I think the circumstances of his death also changed things. You know, because Thomas didn't pass of old age or, unavoidable health problems. It was very much lifestyle driven. We tend to have a very different perspective of who he was as a poet and a person, in our Sylvia Plath episode, we talked about how the myth of Plath is centered around the fact that she had this almost continuous drive towards death.

It was very intentional. It was purposeful. That, in itself, creates a story behind many of her poems that [00:37:00] concern death. I hesitate to say it, but because Thomas was writing about death without the intention of death, without actively seeking it, or even reaching the end of his life and looking back on his many years, it almost has a slightly looser framework to me.

I don't think it has the same impact as it does when you have a line such as in Plath where she says that she's the dew that flies suicidal. You almost remove an element of the power from the poem. I think actually where you draw power from in poems like Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night is from, as I mentioned before, the fear and the anxiety surrounding the death of someone else. But, you mentioned this poem before, And Death Shall Have No Dominion is a wonderful poem. But it's concerned about just death as a general concept.

And I personally don't find it has the same moral backing or strength that perhaps some of his later poems do. Just to read a few lines from this poem. With the man in the wind and the west moon, when their [00:38:00] bones are picked clean, their clean bones gone, they shall have stars at elbow and foot.

Though they go mad, they shall be sane. Though they sink through the sea, they shall rise again. Though lovers be lost love shall not. And death shall have no dominion, now I'd love to know your thoughts on those lines in particular, but I also do think it's worth noting to listeners today that, just because it can be very easy to overlay the story of a poet's life with the poetry that they write.

I think if you were to take Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night and apply it to a poet like Plath, for example, who had an objectively more tragic life, readers would certainly feel very differently about it. 

I think it becomes perhaps more of a mirror to society that we don't necessarily see that as contributing to the poor tortured artist persona that we talk about so often on this podcast. Because Joe and I were talking about this before the podcast, but it was generally seen that Thomas was not the easiest person to be around especially based on some of the things that [00:39:00] other poets and other people have said about him. But just because of that, does that mean that we should take less away from his poetry? Does that mean that we shouldn't have The same reverence or respect for his writing.

I don't think so. I think we have to, as you said, Joe, take a poem at the point of life we're at. The point of poetry is to reflect something about yourself. You have something to find of yourself in every poem you read. And, perhaps as we age and we grow older, maybe we'll take more from Thomas.

Or perhaps as you get past that point at which he lived to. You'll feel slightly differently because 39 is still very young to pass. He certainly had a successful career, he left a legacy, he left an imprint, but does that mean that we say, okay, he lived to nearly 40 so enough's enough and he didn't really need any more?

I don't think that's true at all, but, what do you think?

Joe: It's worth remembering, I think that for people like myself, who are, pretty immersed in the literary world. We read a lot, we read widely, we both studied to master's level at universities. Thomas was somebody that you vaguely have an idea that you have a handle on.

Certainly I'll just speak for myself. You [00:40:00] think, okay, I've read some of the poems I've seen under Milkwood. There are things that I really admire about his writing, but doing sort of more research on him for this episode, I'm just so struck by the writer and the status that he could have occupied had he made different decisions.

And just to give some examples of this, Writers don't exist in a vacuum. We've said this so many times. We talked about this with the first world war episode. We talked about it in the Kipling episode, writers reflect and embody or challenge certain elements of their contemporary moment.

And that can be in a literary sense, in a cultural sense, people like T. S. Eliot, who were absolutely at the forefront of redefining what poetry could be. It can be in a political sense, writers who associate themselves with particular political parties or particular political movements, whether that's around individual law changes or independence movements, it could be all kinds of things.

Thomas's life seems to be defined by his reluctance to align himself with any single group. And just to give some examples Dylan Thomas work is so rooted, for my mind in Welsh stories. Undermilk Wood, if anyone's not aware, has this fabulous [00:41:00] play that he wrote. It's probably his most famous work alongside this poem.

And it's all about these Welsh people in this imagined Welsh town. And it's been performed by some of the great Welsh actors of all times. we're talking Richard Burton, Sir Anthony Hopkins. I was lucky enough to see Michael Sheen perform in this role.

Great Welsh actors about this great Welsh story. And yet Thomas's reluctance to align himself with Welsh nationalism, and his quite rude comments about it, as Maiya mentioned, he could be quite a difficult man, mean that it's difficult to view him as a Welsh voice, even though he's from Wales.

Likewise, politically, we know that he was a left wing figure, and yet his reluctance to publicly align with any kind of political movement, for example, just to illustrate the point, Just after he wrote this poem in 1947, in 1949, he was invited to visit Prague at the invitation of the communist Czech government, because they saw that he was this very sympathetic figure to the left, and he was working on Under Milk Wood at the time, but publicly, he wasn't making grand political statements, so it's difficult to view him in that light.

And then we come to the literary side of things, as [00:42:00] regular listeners will know, I love The mythology around different poetic movements, and I'm sure we're going to do an episode later on some of them in particular, but a lesser known movement, there was a group known as the New Apocalyptics who came to prominence in the 1930s and 1940s.

And what listeners who aren't aware need to understand is that kind of the literary landscape is like a great tide. It goes in and goes out, things come into fashion, and then there's a reaction against them and a reaction against the reaction. people who enjoyed our T. S. Eliot episode will know that there was this great wave of modernist thinking in the 1920s around free verse, around intellectualizing poetry.

It's an intellectual pursuit, reading something like The Waste Land. Thomas's poetry isn't like that at all. It's much more vivid. It's much more about feeling immersed in the emotion of a particular poem and that was very much aligned with these new apocalyptic poets who were reacting against the kind of intellectualization of poetry that's associated with T.

S. Eliot. Now these poets, in that movement, wanted Thomas to come on board. They wanted him to be a part of the movement, and he said no. Even though they were people that, broadly speaking, his poetry was aligned with already. And that refusal [00:43:00] to nail your colours to the mast of any particular movement, whether it's political, whether it's national, whether it's literary, is really fascinating to me.

And, there was no way I was going to get through an episode on Dylan Thomas without talking about Bob Dylan, who, as listeners will know, is my favourite songwriter and an important literary figure in his own right. And one of the most long standing theories about where Bob Dylan chose his name is that he based it off of Dylan Thomas.

And I think the parallels between the two in their private lives is so interesting because it is about that refusal to be pigeonholed. The refusal to let people tell you what your work is about. And again, on the New Apocalyptics,  I think this is a fascinating comparison. The things that the New Apocalyptic Movement believed about poetry were very similar to the things that were being expressed in Dylan Thomas's poetry.

It would not have been a stretch for him to align himself with that. And just to take Bob Dylan in the 1960s as an example of this, he was writing these incredible protest songs and yet never acknowledged that's what they were. Refuses to this day to call them protest songs. And anyone who's seen the recent Timothée Chalamet biopic [00:44:00] will know about his character and his reluctance to align himself with a particular movement or a particular group, whether it's the folk musicians or whether it's the protest singers.

And I think that you can really map Dylan Thomas's life by looking at the groups that he was reluctant to be a part of.

Maiya: I hesitate to say it, but I almost think that perhaps even the debate we're having here today were Dylan Thomas alive to listen? He'd probably be quite glad that people still to this day can't pigeonhole him. They can't put him into something. I almost like to think that Had he been approached for awards and being part of wider anthologies, he potentially would have rejected those too.

So actually his position may have been one that was in many ways intentional, created not to be this huge literary figure, but also not to just fade away into the distance either. 

Joe: I completely agree that, Maiya. I think it's worth just finishing off this episode by saying that the things I've mentioned about these broader movements, they help subsequent readers and academics get a sense of where this person sits. What I think Dylan Thomas [00:45:00] would be really heartened by, and I'm sure he was at the time, is the fact that if you look at individual writers who admire Dylan Thomas, you briefly do away with movements and beliefs and political views.

The sheer number of people who were influenced by him, and I've mentioned Bob Dylan, who've got a Nobel Prize winner right there, Sylvia Plath, we've done an episode on her already, an enormous fan, waited an entire day outside his hotel to meet Dylan Thomas. At the time Dylan Thomas died in New York in hospital after falling ill at the Chelsea Hotel this home of great writers for decades, John Berryman, the poet, was with him when he died.

There were stories of him having lunch with Louis McNeice. He exchanged letters with T. S. Eliot. As a poet, he had this kind of gravitational pull for other artists, and I think sometimes that does get lost in the story of Dylan Thomas. We do make the mistake of thinking that other poets weren't as engaged with his work as they were, perhaps because of his kind of very individual path that he elected to take.

So I hope listeners enjoyed that episode. I had a brilliant time discussing that with you, Maiya. That was really fascinating. And as always, if [00:46:00] listeners want to learn more about Dylan Thomas or other poets on the site, go to PoemAnalysis.com now and sign up for a Poetry+ membership. I would also just once again, do a plug.

Just before we go, a big thank you to everybody who's been listening to the podcast. You've now downloaded it nearly 40, 000 times at the time of recording, which we are really delighted by. We want to keep hearing from you. If there are episodes you'd like us to do, if you have comments, questions, please do get in touch. Remember to like and rate the podcast wherever you get yours and recommend it to friends and family so we can keep making the podcast for you because we really enjoy doing it.

Now, Maiya, next week we are going to be discussing Ode to a Nightingale by John Keats and I cannot wait for that conversation. But until then, it's goodbye from me.

Maiya: And goodbye from me and the whole team at PoemAnalysis.com and Poetry+.