Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night : Critism

Jhan Hochman

Jhan Hochman is a freelance writer and currently teaches at Portland Community College, Portland, OR. In the following essay, Hochman suggests that the contradiction inherent in Thomas’s instructions to “rage against” a death that he terms a “good night” serves as a plea to the dying to show their love for those whom they leave behind.

While Dylan Thomas’s “Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night” could be addressed to anyone, by the end of the last stanza, the reader realizes that the specific addressee is Thomas’s sick father. In this poem he never sent, the son entreats his father not to accept death quietly, but instead, to fight it. While the more usual sentiment counsels accepting death peacefully and gracefully, something more provocative is at work here: that is, though death is a “good night” in its romantic or hopeful sense of restful bedtime and peaceful darkness, one should not accept it, and instead “rage” against this “dying of the light.” Perhaps it is this contradiction, unreconciled, that gives this poem its power, its ability to paralyze rational overcoming and obstruct the desire to make polarities meet at some middle ground. This poem says that death is good and that one should rage against it. Perhaps we should be skeptical and ask: Why rage against what is, what is good, what cannot be avoided, in other words, why fight death?

In “Do Not Go Gentle,” every first and third line of the five three-lined “tercets” and first, third, and fourth lines of the final four-lined “quatrain” end-rhyme with “night” or “light” (aba or abaa). This scheme characterizes the villanelle (derived from the Italian villan, meaning “peasant”), a form that comes from sixteenth century peasant songs. Poets usually employed the villanelle for light or bucolic subjects, a kind of peacefully rural poem or “pastoral.” “Do Not Go Gentle” is one of the most famous examples of this rather uncommon form and for at least the following reason: the poem does not preach calm, as might be expected, but rage, rage against death, that event often equated with Nature as an ultimate physical force. This is not a villanelle expressing the pleasure of nature’s cycles and seasons, a balanced acceptance of births and deaths, but a raging against what is, an acknowledgment that a life within nature — as all lives subject to life and death must be — is not just harmoniously repetitive but also full of sudden pain and occasional grieving. Perhaps this is one reason for Thomas’s euphemism, “good night,” an expression minimizing death, that event which apparently is too painful for Thomas to mention.

Day and night or light and dark are long-standing metaphors for life and death, and while Thomas merely adopts the tradition, he also breathes new life into it. The four middle tercets describe the acts of four kinds of men — “wise,” “good,” “wild,” and “grave” — employing words associated with light and dark. In the second tercet, the words of wise men “forked no lightning,” presumably in the darkness of the foolish. In the third tercet, the deeds of the last tide of good men were not “bright” enough to “dance” (sparkle) on the “green bay,” or what might here be thought of here — since the water is green instead of blue — as the darker, more dangerous world. The wild men of the fourth tercet “who caught and sang the sun in flight,” only “grieved it on its way,” that is, made matters worse, perhaps by being partially blind to the darker side of human wildness. Finally, in the fifth tercet, grave men near death, despite their “blinding sight,” that is, their presumed ability to see more clearly because they are dying, can “blaze like meteors and be gay,” being gay or happy as itself as a state of lightness.

Though, while living, these four types of enlightened men or people — the wise, good, wild, and grave — failed to lighten the dark world they lived in, at times even unwittingly darkened it with their brave and clear vision, or obscured its misery with their overly bright outlook, they must not fail to blaze and rage against the darkness of death. They must rebel against “the dying of the light” and “close of day” no matter what the role light played in their life. In this sense, Thomas asks us to see rage as a kind of beam of light shooting through the darkness of death, light which refuses death’s pacification or darkening. Such a light yields a vision which exposes death in the way Thomas comprehends it: the ultimate horror. Therefore, Thomas counsels his father to make the ultimate refusal by refusing the ultimate, urges his father toward futile rebellion against what is and cannot be stopped. One may ask themselves whether or not the horror attached to death is primarily natural and therefore unavoidable (as Thomas seems to believe), or whether the horror of death arises from particular cultural viewpoints of death as horrible.

Thomas called his poems “statements on the way to the grave” and “two sides of an unresolved argument,” both comments relevant to “Do Not Go Gentle.” Compare his “I See the Boys of Summer” where an older father figure condemns young boys as possessing that kind of death in life known as destructive energy, and the boys defend themselves with, “But seasons must be challenged or they totter.” In “Do Not Go Gentle,” however, the son internalizes the father, counseling him to take hold of youth’s destructive energy and turn it against the ultimate destroyer, death. See also the dialogue in Thomas’s “‘Find Meat on Bones’” between father and son where this time, in reverse direction from “Do Not Go Gentle,” the father urges the son to “‘Rebel against the ... Autocracy of night and day / Dictatorship of sun / ... against the flesh and bone.” Far more obvious here is the coupling of Death and Nature already mentioned in the second paragraph above. In “A Refusal to Mourn the Death, By Fire, of a Child in London,” Thomas maintains that saying nothing (eloquently) is the only thing which can be said in the aftermath of death. While silence must succeed death in “Refusal,” raging must precede it in “Do Not Go Gentle.” In “Fern Hill,” Thomas remarks on the death resting latent within youthful invulnerability, the opposite of a kind of immature raging or tantrum in the face of “Do Not Go Gentle’s” “dying of the light.” And finally refer to his “Elegy,” an unfinished poem by Thomas written after his father’s death and completed after his own death from notes he left behind. Unlike what Thomas had pleaded that his father do in the face of imminent death, in

“Elegy,” Thomas’s father remained what he always was: “kind” and “brave” and “too proud to cry.”

If “kind,” “brave” and “proud” describe Thomas’s father in “Elegy,” was the man also “wise,” “good,” “wild,” and “grave,” adjectives used for men in “Do Not Go Gentle”? Was the father all of these? None of them? While this cannot be accurately answered with evidence found in the poem, it might be that adjectives found in “Elegy,” coupled with some theorizing on the word, “gentle,” of “Do Not Go Gentle,” can provide a clue. Notice that Thomas substitutes the less grammatically correct part of speech, the adjective, “gentle,” in place of the more correct and usual adverbial form, “gently.” Why? Perhaps because as an adjective, “gentle” can be used to describe Thomas’s “kind” father, could even be an epithet for him. So when Thomas says, “Do not go gentle into that good night,” a translation might be, “Do not go, gentle father, into that final goodbye,” or “Do not die father, do not accept death.” In the end, if wise, good, wild, and grave men rage against death, so should gentle men.

“Within this structure ... Thomas creates a poem of great force, beauty, and tenderness, in which sound and sense are exquisitely blended.”

But for whose benefit is this advice given? Is it for Dylan Thomas’s father or Thomas himself, the latter who seems unable to tolerate the idea of his father dying? If we answer that the advice is offered more for the benefit of Thomas himself than for his father, this being part of the reason Thomas never sent the poem to his father, then “Do Not Go Gentle” becomes less a poem of defiance than a poem of paralysis and pain. With this in mind, perhaps an answer to the question that began our discussion of “Do Not Go Gentle” can now be ventured. The question was, Why rage against what is, is good, what cannot be avoided, in other words, death? The answer, Thomas seems to imply with the words, “bless me” in the final stanza, is that raging against death, while also, as Thomas says, a “curse” for friends and relatives to endure, is more importantly a blessing on those left behind, on those not wanting the dying to leave them. For this reason: by raging “against the dying of the light,” by struggling against death, the dying demonstrate — or so the living would like to believe — their love of those who will be left behind. Perhaps more than anything, this is the kind of demonstration Thomas wanted so desperately from his father.

Source: Jhan Hochman, in an essay for Poetry for Students, Gale, 1997.

taken from here...