Do not go gentle into that good night by Dylan Thomas – Expert Analysis

Welsh poet Dylan Thomas published “Do not go gentle into that good night” in 1951, just two years before he died from alcohol-related health complications in 1953. Generally, when it comes to any kind of literary analysis, I’m a big fan of Roland Barthes’ “death of the author” thesis: basically, the idea that using an author’s biographical details to ascribe meaning to a text is a flawed way of interpreting or analyzing it. Nevertheless, I opened by pointing out the proximity of the poem’s publication to the death of its author. That’s because the poem is, undoubtedly, a meditation on death—and how to confront it. The poem’s speaker urges their readers, and later their father, not to submit willingly to death. But if that were the poem’s entire meaning, we could stop our whole “Do not go gentle into that good night” analysis right there. Instead, we’ll go through the poem systematically, and hopefully tease out some of its nuances, quirks, and deeper meanings.

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.

Do not go gentle into that good night analysis – structure and form

Any “Do not go gentle into that good night” analysis requires a discussion of the poem’s form. “Do not go gentle into that good night” is a villanelle—a poetic form that dates back to 16th century France. A villanelle consists of nineteen lines divided into six stanzas—five tercets (a stanza of three lines) and a final quatrain (a stanza of four lines). Villanelles also make use of refrains, or phrases that get repeated at regular intervals throughout a poem. In a villanelle, the first and third lines of the first stanza become refrains that appear as the last lines in alternating subsequent stanzas. The first line of the first stanza—Do not go gentle into that good night—becomes the last line of the second and fourth stanzas. The third line of the first stanza—­Rage, rage against the dying of the light—becomes the last line of the third and fifth stanzas. The two refrains appear once more as the last two lines of the final quatrain.

But why would Thomas have chosen the villanelle—a relatively out-of-fashion (at least at the time of his writing it) and rigid form—to confront his subject matter? One critic has suggested that the twin refrains embody a duality reflected in the content of the poem—between the impulse to resist death at all costs and the acceptance that death is a natural and inevitable part of life. When reading the poem, or, even better, when listening to Thomas himself recite it, those dual refrains do begin to take on a hypnotic, inevitable quality. And that recurrence, or inevitability, mirrors the inevitability of death itself.

Do not go gentle into that good night analysis – 1st stanza

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.

The first stanza lays out what might as well be the poem’s thesis—that despite the inevitability of death, it should be resisted right up until the end. A few interesting things to note: first, the poem’s speaker is anonymous, and remains anonymous throughout. We don’t ever figure out the speaker’s name, age, or gender. In fact, the only thing we know about the speaker is that they have a father near the end of his life. Second, the refrains in this stanza are imperatives, or commands—they implore us, warn us, plead with us: Do not go gentle into that good night…Rage against the dying of the light. In subsequent stanzas, though, the refrains aren’t always imperatives. Finally, the first stanza is somewhat disconnected from the others; it’s not grounded in time or place, and we don’t see any characters. The language is almost disembodied, universal.

2nd stanza

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.

Here, the speaker suggests that it’s wise to accept the inevitability and universality of death. But even though the wise accept death, they still resist it. Why? Well, because their words had forked no lightning. What the heck does that mean? Words are descriptors, messengers, and conveyors of meaning. The verb “to fork” can be understood as “digging into something with a fork”—to grab hold of, capture. And if there’s one thing that seems truly impossible to fork, to capture, it’d be lightning. Is the speaker suggesting that language somehow fails to capture the depth and reality of our world? In any case, the emotion here is one of regret. And I love the sly inversion: we often think of a fork of lightning or a lightning fork in the night sky, but here it’s the lightning that’s being forked.

Do not go gentle into that good night Analysis – 3rd stanza

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.

The third stanza opens with another subtle but brilliant inversion of language: we see good men “wave by.” I’m used to coupling the words “wave” and “bye,” as in, “The students waved bye to their parents.” Here, though, men are waving by, passing by, on a wave that’s ultimately going to crash against the shore. But in a way, they are waving bye, too: they’re headed towards the end, towards death. Again, the feeling of the third stanza is regret. Good men look back on their lives and wish they could’ve done more, so they “rage against the dying of the light” (note how the refrain isn’t an imperative here; it’s a description). The “green bay” might be a stand-in for the men’s life—the color green makes me picture sea grass, algae, and life.   

4th stanza

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.

The fourth stanza stands in direct contrast to the second. In the second, the wise men’s words failed to fork lightning. Here, wild men actually succeed in doing something just as impossible—catching the sun. The fact that the wild men succeeded where the wise men failed, however, doesn’t seem to change anything. Wild and wise both are headed for inevitable death. Maybe the speaker is gesturing towards the futility and impermanence of our actions during our lives. And because we’re all too aware of that impermanence, we rage at the fact of death. One more interesting note here—what exactly is the “it” that the wild men grieve? Are they grieving the sun itself? If so, that leads to two possible readings. They could be grieving the sun going down, day transforming to night. Or they could be lamenting the fact that even the sun is impermanent. The latter interpretation might be a little more far-fetched, but I like it. The poem’s depiction of death gets grimmer—if that’s even possible. Death is so implacable and all-encompassing that it swallows the sun.

Do not go gentle into that good night – analysis – 5th stanza

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.

Right away we get what might be the most obvious of the poem’s puns: grave men. The men are grave—they’re serious—and they’re quite literally grave—they’re approaching death. These men (and I think “men” can be read to mean “people”) come to realize that old age doesn’t—or shouldn’t—equate with lifelessness. Even blind eyes can “blaze like meteors and be gay.” And therefore, even the elderly, those closer to death, should be indignant that their lives will come to a close. I love the use of alliteration in this stanza: “who see with blinding sight / blind eyes could blaze like meteors…”

6th stanza

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.

In the sixth and final stanza, we go from macro to micro, from the universal to the personal. The speaker addresses their father, who seems to be on the verge of death. The speaker prays to be both blessed and cursed by their father’s tears. The tears are a blessing because they are “fierce,” an affirmation of life in the face of death. They’re a curse because they signal the unyielding approach of death. Any death, but especially the death of a parent, is a reminder of one’s own mortality. A pretty straightforward stanza in my estimation, but what’s going on with that weird “sad height”? The imagery could be read as a simple metaphor for being on the “edge” of death. But it might also be seen as a physical representation of the psychic aloneness one feels at death’s door. One scholar has even suggested that it could be an allusion to Shakespeare’s “King Lear”.

Do not go gentle into that good night analysis – Summing up

Any “Do not go gentle into that good night” analysis—or any analysis of literature, for that matter—requires some interpretive risk-taking. It’s risky to say with one hundred percent confidence what a poem “means.” Is the “sad height” really an allusion to the cliffs of Dover in King Lear? Does the “green bay” really represent life? These are questions that don’t have answers. And looking to Thomas himself is no help either. After all, if all Thomas wanted to do was tell the world his thoughts on death, he could have written an op-ed or an argumentative essay, or a research paper. But he didn’t. In the end, all we have is the poem, the work itself.

Do not go gentle into that good night – Meaning

With all that preamble out of the way, it does seem safe to say that a “Do not go gentle into that good night” analysis leaves us with a key insight about death—that death should be fought against, raged against, even though it’s inevitable. But maybe there’s a different insight to be had if we probe a little deeper. Okay, death is bad, and fighting against death is good. But why? Why should we not go gentle, why should we rage? At least as I see it, the poem suggests an answer: because death is unfair. Read this way, the poem isn’t really “about” death as much as it’s about the human predicament (as grandiose as that sounds). We humans are aware of our mortality. We’re aware we’re impermanent—not just us, but our actions, too. Our deeds are frail, our words fork no lightning. Any attempt to have a lasting impact on the world is ultimately doomed. To be human is to be all too aware of this fact. So we should be indignant, outraged. We should burn and rave and rage.

Do not go gentle into that good night Analysis – Additional Resources

If you found this literary analysis helpful, you may also wish to check out additional blogs from our High School Success series. Highlights include:

• The Road Not Taken by Robert Frost – Analysis
• To Be or Not to Be Hamlet Analysis
• The Great Gatsby Themes and Analysis