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.

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My Papa's Waltz : Critism

Marisa Anne Pagnattaro

Marissa Anne Pagnattaro is a writer and teaching assistant at the Unversity of Georgia, Athens. In the following essay, Pagnattaro provides a stanza by stanza analysis of “My Papa’s Waltz.

Is this a narrative poem about a sentimental joyful romp or a fearful incident of violent abuse at the hands of an alcoholic father? Critics are often polarized into one of these two extreme views of Theodore Roethke’s 1948 poem, “My Papa’s Waltz,” yet neither interpretation adequately captures the full range of the speaker’s emotion. The adult speaker recalls this vivid scene with his father, revealing the complicated interplay between what was nearly an overwhelming experience for him as a child, but is now merely a poignant remembrance.

Although reading the poem as purely autobiographical is too limiting, a few details from Roethke’s life provide an enlightening background. As a child, Roethke’s father, Otto, immigrated from Germany with his parents who had bought land in the United States to establish a market garden. Financially successful in this endeavor, the family eventually started a florist business, which was continued by Otto. Roethke, who lived in a house adjacent to the greenhouse, was powerfully influenced by both the life-giving process of growing plants and his father’s gift of nurturing beautiful flowers. This admiration, however, was entangled with feelings of ambivalence. For instance, Roethke’s stern father held extremely high expectations that were not always possible for his son to achieve. Moreover, Roethke was never able to fully reconcile his feelings before his father’s death; after a long illness. Otto died of cancer when Roethke was in high school. Later, when Roethke was in his late thirties, he wrote “My Papa’s Waltz” as part of a collection of poems titled The Lost Son. In these poems, Roethke seems to be exploring ways to come to terms with his childhood and adolescence. “My Papa’s Waltz,” an introspective look at a young boy’s relationship with his father, is rooted in a continuation of that self-scrutiny.

Even though the title seems to be addressed to a general audience of readers, in effect asserting “I am going to tell you about ‘My Papa’s Waltz,’” the speaker directly addresses his father in the poem. This appears to be a form of tribute to the father, in the sense that it recounts a memory of closeness — albeit fraught with some childhood anxiety. As an adult, the speaker seems to appreciate his father’s rather clumsy attempt to show his paternal love. Emphasizing the father’s awkwardness, Roethke plays with his readers’ notions of the waltz. The overall rhythm of the verse follows the cadence of waltz rhythm, a graceful flowing melody in triple time. The poem begins with a strong first beat, followed by two lighter beats, with the second of these being an upbeat “pushing” into the new first beat. More simply stated, the rhythm is a repetition of: ONE two three ONE two three.

“Roethke seems to be exploring ways to come to terms with his childhood and adolescence. ‘My Papa’s Waltz,’ an introspective look at a young boy’s relationship with his father, is rooted in a continuation of that self-scrutiny.”

By using the waltz steps, Roethke gives his readers a feel for the movement of the dance. There are, however, a few “missteps” in the form of an extra syllable for emphasis. In five of the lines the extra beat interrupts the smooth flow of the dance. These rhythmic disturbances provide readers with a palpable sense of the clumsiness of the actual dance.

The first stanza opens with the vivid image of the father’s hot whisky breath, an odor that the speaker recalls was potent enough to make him feel giddy and confused as a child. Significantly, he “hung on like death” with great dramatic tenacity because “Such waltzing was not easy.” The evening dance is nearly overpowering for the young boy. This is underscored by the second and fourth lines that contain the extra beat. The effect is to slightly throw off the controlled waltz cadence, which effectively conveys an air of the father’s perceptible intoxication. It is unclear how much the father has had to drink, but an inference of at least slight inebriation permeates the poem.

The potential seriousness of the “death” image in the third line, however, is undercut in the first line of the second stanza by the use of the word “romped.” This unmistakably frolicsome term suggests the lively play of children, not a boy victimized by his father. Moreover, the pans “slide” from the shelf, as if unobtrusively moved along the surface from the vibration of their dance as opposed to a reckless drunken careening about the room. The pair cavort in the kitchen, ostensibly the mother’s domain. Oddly enough in a lyric directed to his father, the speaker refers to his mother as “My mother,” creating distance between his two parents. The use of the formal term “mother” stands in sharp contrast to the much more familiar term “Papa.” Perhaps this is indicative of the closeness that the speaker feels toward his father. In any event, the mother’s appearance in the poem adds a brief third-party perspective to the memory. She looks on in clear wrinkled-brow disapproval. Her displeasure presumably stems from a number of sources, including her isolation from the waltzing play, her irritation about husband’s drinking, and her perception that her young son is being dragged about the room. Significantly, she holds back, not intervening and allowing the rollick to carry on.

Throughout the two remaining stanzas, the dance continues as a metaphor for the speaker’s fearfully loving relationship with his somewhat rough father. Like Roethke’s father, the father in the poem makes his living with his hands. One knuckle is “battered,” suggesting it has been subjected to repeated assault at work. Instead of holding his son’s hand, which would be customary with waltz partners, the father clasps his son’s wrist. Unable to follow his father’s unsteady lead, the boy’s right ear scrapes against his father’s belt buckle every time his father misses a step. The use of “scraped” creates a physically painful image, yet the speaker evidences no negative emotion toward his father. He merely reports on the scene and uses the extra syllable in the second and fourth lines in the third stanza to once again prompt speculation that the father’s waltzing ability is impaired by alcohol.

The fourth and final stanza echoes the images already established in the poem. With a palm “caked hard by dirt,” the father repeatedly hits his son on the head “beating time.” These lines, coupled with the preceding stanza, could suggest the speaker’s less-than-consensual engagement in the dance, yet the overall lilt of the poem belies such a harsh reading. The two concluding lines are riddled with the speaker’s ambivalence as the result of differences in his adult and childhood perspectives: “Then waltzed me off to bed / Still clinging to your shirt.” The use of the word “clinging” prompts multiple readings. He could be holding on tightly out of fear of his father, in apprehension that he might be knocked to the floor in a misstep. He could also, however, desire to remain close or in contact with his father out of a sense of great attachment, refusing to abandon the connection he feels. In the end, there is something warm about the image of the father dancing his son off to be tucked in for the night.

It is easy for readers to visualize the speaker as a young boy with one hand clinging to his father’s shirt, his other arm outstretched with his wrist clasped in his father’s hand, feet on his father’s feet, in a dangling pre-bed dance. Even though there is a sense of the speaker’s uncertainty about the event as a boy, there is an air of nostalgia in the scene for the speaker as an adult, ultimately producing a loving re-creation of the dance with his father.

Source: Marissa Anne Pagnattaro, in a essay for Poetry for Students, Gale, 1998.

mother to son : Critism

Aidan Wasley

Aidan Wasley is a writer and instructor at Yale Unversity. In the essay below, Wasley explores Hughes’s dramatic monologue “Mother to Son,” positioning it within the context of African – American culture and traditions and linking the character of the mother with the voice of African-American history.

“Mother to Son,” one of Langston Hughes’s earliest poems, takes the form of a dramatic monologue; that is, a poem spoken not in the poet’s own voice but in that of a particular imagined speaker, in this case a weary mother addressing her son. The son, as we can surmise from the first line, has either asked his mother a question or complained of his frustrations, to which his mother responds, “Well, son, I’ll tell you.” She proceeds to recount for her son the difficulties of her own life, telling him “Life for me ain’t been no crystal stair,” yet suggesting to him that those difficulties are, if not ultimately surmountable, at least worth struggling against:

So boy, don’t you turn back.
Don’t you set down on the steps
Cause you finds it’s kinder hard.
Don’t you fall now —
For I’se still goin’, honey,
I’se still climbin’,
And life for me ain’t been no crystal stair.

The poem’s use of the dramatic monologue places the reader in the position of the son, listening to his mother draw a lesson from her life that can be applied to his own. The reader is thus drawn into the poem, as the son’s frustrations become our own, and the mother’s advice becomes directed at us. The identification with the speaker and the listener which the poem forces upon the reader encourages us to look for ways in which this poem can be seen to address issues beyond the apparently simple scene it depicts, and raises questions about the poet’s strategies for communicating those concerns.

Hughes, who wrote this poem when he was 21, was — obviously — neither an old woman, nor, as a college-educated intellectual, did he speak or write in the dialect in which the mother’s thoughts are expressed. What then are the implications of this imaginative projection? Why would the young, highly educated African-American poet imagine himself speaking in the voice of an old woman talking about the troubles of her life to her son? What might this old woman symbolize?

In another famous Hughes poem, entitled “The Negro Mother,” we find a similar speaker in a similar dramatic situation, as the title character addresses her African-American sons and daughters:

Children, I come back today
To tell you a story of the long dark way
That I had to climb, that I had to know
In order that the race might live and grow.

In “The Negro Mother,” which was written some years after”Mother to Son,” the speaker also tells her children about the “dark” and difficult “climb” she has faced in her life, and suggests that her struggles will make those of her children easier to bear. But in the later poem, Hughes makes explicit the connection between the speaker and larger issues of African-American culture, as the figure of “The Negro Mother” comes to be seen not simply as an old woman talking to her children, but as, in some sense, the voice of African-American history itself, recounting its arduous struggle “that the race might live and grow.” In the same way, we can see the speaker of “Mother to Son” as representing a kind of collective voice, the voice of the generations of African-Americans whose troubled history — from the slave-ships, to the plantations, to Reconstruction, to the Great Migration to the urban North — “ain’t been no crystal stair.”

It has been a long, wearying, uphill journey, she says,
It’s had tacks in it,
And Splinters,
And boards torn up,
And places with no carpet on the floor —
Bare.

“While ‘Mother to Son’ shows the influence of Hughes’s interest in the blues, it lies most directly within the tradition of the spiritual,”

The speaker equates the history of African Americans with an endless flight of broken-down stairs, such as might be found in the the cramped and crumbling tenements in which many poor blacks found themselves forced to live in the ghetto neighborhoods of the northern cities. Yet no matter how frustrating or tiring the climb, no matter how many setbacks she has suffered, she says, “I’se been a-climbin’ on.” The future of blacks in America, she suggests to her son and to the reader, depends on this willingness to keep climbing, to not turn back, to not “set down on the steps / ’Cause you finds it’s kinder hard.” We’re not at the top of the stairs yet, she tells us, and we may feel like giving up, but it is only by continuing to climb that, in the words of the traditional African-American spiritual, “We shall overcome someday.”

The roots of Hughes’s poetry run deep into the tradition of African-American music, especially spirituals, jazz, and blues. The title of Hughes’s first book, in which “Mother to Son” was published, was The Weary Blues, and throughout his career he proved an innovator in adapting the forms and motifs of the blues — with its heavy beats, recurrent refrains, and melancholy narratives — and the improvisitory riffs and earthy themes of jazz, to poetry. While “Mother to Son” shows the influence of Hughes’s interest in the blues, especially in its use of repetition and of the idiomatic dialect in which most blues songs were sung (though Hughes also found ample precedent for his use of dialect in the poetry of Paul Laurence Dunbar, who gained fame at the turn of the century as the “Bard of the Negro Race” through his colorful verse written in rural black patois), it lies most directly within the tradition of the spiritual, a connection which is made clear through the central image of the poem, the “crystal stair.”

In this image we hear an echo of the Biblical story of Jacob’s Ladder (Genesis, chapter 28, verses 10-22), in which Jacob sees in a dream a vision of a celestial stairway upon which angels climb and descend between earth and heaven. In the dream God tells Jacob, “This land on which you are lying I will give to you and your descendants [and] they will be as countless as the dust of the earth.” That land would become Israel and Jacob’s sons, the Israelites. This story held an abiding significance within the African-American Christian tradition — especially in the pre-Civil-War slave-holding South — as it spoke to a faith that, like the Israelites, black Americans too would be delivered to a “Promised Land.” The heavenly stairway became a powerful image of liberation and salvation, attainable only through suffering and faith in God. Hughes, along with most African-Americans of his time, would have been very familiar with the associations of Jacob’s Ladder with the struggle for freedom and equality of blacks in America, especially in its expression in one of the best-known traditional spirituals, “We Are Climbing Jacob’s Ladder.” This song, which would have been sung first in the fields and later in churches, involves a call-and-response between a singer and a chorus not unlike the relationship of Hughes’s mother and son. It speaks of climbing “higher and higher” to become “soldiers of the Lord,” includes the exhortation “Keep on climbing, we will make it,” and ends with the question, “Children do you want your freedom?”

In this light, it becomes easy to see Hughes’s mother figure as something like a racial matriarch addressing her scattered children and exhorting them to “keep on climbing” on their way to freedom. It also shows us how Hughes uses a single image, the “crystal stair,” to evoke simultaneously the painful history of blacks in America while pointing to the tradition of faith and hope that has sustained them through it all.

But there is, perhaps, yet another way of reading this poem. In the history of poetry, poets have often included representations in their poems of their “muse.” The idea of a poet’s muse is based on the notion within Greek mythology of the Nine Muses — sister-goddesses who were responsible for inspiring all the different arts. The figure of the muse — what we might call the personification of the poet’s inspiration — is usually represented as a woman to whom the poet gives credit for his or her power to write. It is not uncommon — at least until the twentieth century — for poets to include invocations to or by the muse in their poetry, as in the case of the the sixteenth-century poet Sir Philip Sidney, whose muse, at the beginning of a long sequence of poems called “Astrophil and Stella,” famously tells him, “Look in thy heart and write.” In this context, we might read the mother in Hughes’s poem not only as a representation of African-American history, but also as a kind of muse-figure.

Hughes was just beginning his career as a poet when he wrote this poem, so questions of what to write about and how best to forge his poetic voice and identity would be pressing issues for him. Would he strive to represent his race in poetry, and be a self-consciously black poet, or would he reject a racial poetic identity, as poets like Countee Cullen would try to do? Would he look to his African-American cultural heritage for inspiration, or was the black American experience, and its tradition of artistic expression, somehow outside the conventional boundaries of poetry? These were difficult questions for the young writer, and if we read “Mother to Son” in terms of these concerns, we see the poet struggling to come to terms with them. In this context, the “son” of the title becomes not the reader, but the poet himself, and the poem suggests that the son’s frustration and despair is that of the poet, faced with the impossible task of writing poetry that truly speaks to and for the African-American experience. The poet — the “son” of African American history and its artistic legacy of spirituals, blues, and jazz — looks to his “mother” for advice and the strength to keep going. Her response is stern, yet supportive: “So boy, don’t you turn back. / Don’t you sit down on the steps / ’Cause you finds it kinder hard.” The task he has before him is an arduous one, she says, but it is an important and necessary one. African-American culture and history keeps moving and it is his job as poet to record it; she’s “still climbin’” and he has to keep step.

The poet’s “mother,” who speaks in the voice of the African-American tradition, teaches him he need not abandon that tradition in order to write poetry. All poetry, she says, need not be about “crystal stairs.” It can have “tacks” and “splinters” in it, “and places with no carpet on the floor.” It need not conform to white conventions in either form or subject — it can be “bare” — yet it need not ignore those conventions if they can be of use (In fact, the line, “And life for me ain’t been no crystal stair” is written in iambic pentameter, the most traditional of English poetic meters). The poet discovers, from listening to his mother-muse, a way to bring the African-American experience into poetry. He finds a way to move forward, to keep climbing. We can read in this poem, then, a kind of metaphor for the young poet’s artistic coming of age. From his “mother” he learns the value and power of his vocation. He hears in her song his own voice.

Source: Aidan Wasley, in an essay for Poetry for Students, Gale, 1998

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