Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night : Themes

Anger

The poem tells its reader to “rage” against dying, and it offers several examples of men who feel their lives unfulfilled, but it does not offer any reason why raging might be more appropriate than despair or peaceful acceptance of the absurdity of death. Anger is a heated, unreasoning emotion, and Thomas is too clever to try reasoning about it. By giving us the models of wise men, good men, wild men, and grave men, Thomas populates this poem with men who have all been in vigorous pursuit of something in their lives, and their anger would therefore result from frustration and disappointment. Although it could be said that these are admirable types of men, and that if they all reach the same conclusion having traveled there on different roads then it must be the correct one, they still do not achieve any comfort or satisfaction from raging — from not going gentle. The poem is expressed as advice, “choose rage,” but these men do not find their rage by choice.

So why does “Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night” advocate rage, if the details of the poem do not lead naturally to it? Anger is much more of a young man’s emotion than an old man’s, and anger’s value is that it can create a powerful feeling, even if it cannot beat death. In the final stanza, the speaker addresses his father “on that sad height.” Perhaps this poem is not meant to offer sound advice, but to show us a young man’s unreasonable, almost hysterical refusal to cope with the sad weakness of his father by evoking rage. Another possibility is that anger, though not completely satisfying, is considered here to be better than sadness.

Human Condition

As it is shown in “Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night,” the human condition — the situation we all find ourselves presented with — is as simple as the contrast between light and dark. Life, the light, can be filled with any number of activities, but even the most noble of these turn out to be distractions that are easily forgotten as death approaches. The poem implies that the only adequate response to death is an emotional one, that humans cannot do anything with their lives that would make death a peaceful transition.

Still, in offering the four models for living that Thomas does in stanzas 2 through 5, he does give a sense that he has priorities as to how life can be lived. The poem examines the specific cases of good men, wise men, wild men, and grave men: in examining these and ignoring other ways of life, the poem seems to have selected them out of dozens of possibilities as being the only lifestyles that are worth serious consideration. Men who acquire great wealth, for example, are not mentioned, nor are holy men. Lives filled with humor or love are left out. It could be said that each of these unmentioned lives can be fit into one of the main categories, that for the purposes of this compact, tightly structured verse all people of the earth can be categorized as wise, good, wild or grave. If this is so, then the poem is only recognizing a narrow way to live. The question is whether these four types are meant to be the only way we can live or are the only ways of life that are important enough to consider.

Identity

This poem is addressed to the speaker’s father, which helps us put the poem’s stance in perspective. The angry attitude that the speaker tells his father to take is not necessarily suggested for all people, but is instead an emotional reaction to the imminent death of a figure of power. Thomas uses the formalized villanelle style to make a comment, not about death, but about standing by when a loved one faces death. The tight structure suggests an attempt to hold on to emotions.

The fact that sons identify with the circumstances of their fathers has been a constant throughout history, and the son of a father who projects a strong, controlling presence can be understandably disturbed at the prospect of watching the father’s power diminish. Thomas is on record as having written poems in response to his father’s death, and we know from interviews that his father was the sort of boisterous, lively man who was himself likely to rage against unfairness when he was in the best of health. In wishing to see the same indignation against death, the speaker of this poem is balancing fear of death against a primal, almost Freudian belief in the power of the father.

The examples of the wise, good, wild, and grave men extend this beyond a self-analytical poem about Thomas’s family and into the realm of an exploration of identity. By all accounts, Thomas’s father was not the sort of man one would instinctively use these words to describe. In examining these four categories, the speaker of this poem is identifying the kind of man he would like his father to be and, by extension, the kind of man he would like to be himself. The reference in line 5, to wise men experiencing disappointment because “their words had forked no light,” is particularly more appropriate to the poet than to his father. Likewise, the metaphor of sight and blindness in stanza 5 reflects Thomas’s understanding of poetic knowledge and its limitations, not necessarily his description of his father or anyone else. By using these examples, the poem’s speaker reveals ideals of what he would like to be before death.

My Papa's Waltz : Theme

Memory

The Lost Son, which was published in 1948, the year Roethke turned forty, is a collection of poems in which the writer examines his childhood and adolescence. “My Papa’s Waltz” looks back at Roethke’s experience as a child, dancing with his now-dead father in the family’s home. The title seems addressed to an audience and refers to the father in the third person, as if to say, “Here is a poem about my father and a dance he used to do with me.” The poem itself, however, is a first-person account directed by a child to his father. This distinction corresponds to a division between Theodore Roethke the objective observer of the past, the poet who records the experience and labels it (gives it a title), and Theodore Roethke the child who subjectively experiences the dance and speaks to his still-living father.

The poem is permeated by the child’s sense of his own smallness and weakness in comparison to his father. A “small boy” made “dizzy” by the alcohol on his father’s breath and scraped by the father’s belt buckle, the child found that waltzing with this parent “was not easy.” He was buffeted by the force of his father’s movements, and it was all he could do to simply hang on. These are vivid details, richly evocative of the boy’s sense of inferiority to his powerful father. Even the phrase “waltzed me off to bed” expresses the disparity in strength between the two. It suggests that the dancing was not an activity that was performed by or with the boy, but rather something done to him.

Although the poem is told from the point of view of Roethke as a child, it is, significantly, told in the past tense. If the poem were truly to view the scene through the boy’s eyes, it would be in the present tense and would read something like: “The whiskey on your breath makes me dizzy; but I hang on like death: such waltzing is not easy.” The events would unfold as the boy experiences them. But “My Papa’s Waltz” is a poem written by an adult looking back on events from long before. Through an imaginative use of memory the poet provides us with a dual perspective on the father. We see the awe-inspiring figure the child sees, but we also see the inebriated and rambunctious laborer that the adult observes.

We need not choose between the two views of the father, nor indeed should we attempt to. The poem is not simply about something that happened to a child, it is also about what happens when that event is remembered when the child is an adult. The past becomes part of the present in the process of recalling it. The present is the moment of the poem’s writing, but that moment is suffused with the past.

Order and Disorder

“My Papa’s Waltz” announces its central image in the title: the waltz, a formal dance. A waltz, like other dances, is a prescribed set of steps that organizes movements in time and in space, giving them order. In the poem it was the father who led the dance, who “beat time” on his son’s head. It was he who established the order of the household. The mother was a disapproving but, in the context of the poem, an inactive presence. The boy did all he could just to keep up: “Such waltzing,” he states, “was not easy.” But the poem also shows that the father was a force of disorder as well. He was drunk. He made his son dizzy, caused pans to fall from the shelf, and scraped the boy’s ear. The fact that he missed steps suggests that he could not adhere to the order that he himself had instituted.

There is a sense in the poem that the waltz was not an isolated incident, that it was often repeated. One almost has the feeling that it was a daily pattern, a bedtime ritual. This means, then, that the disorderly dance was, paradoxically, itself a form of order, a regularly recurring event that established a routine in the household. The waltz in the title thus refers not to a dance as it commonly understood, but rather it refers to a regularly performed set of disorderly movements. It was a unique sort of waltz, a unique sort of order that incorporated disorder. It was a waltz created and defined by “My Papa.”

mother to son : Theme

Race and Racism

The struggle that the mother in this poem describes is common to all people of every race and class, but Hughes narrows in on her identity by giving the speaker’s voice the dialect of a poor, undereducated African American. Readers who recognize this dialect and who have even a little knowledge about the struggle for racial equality in the United States will be able to associate the “staircase” metaphor and the setbacks that the speaker says she faced with the obstacles faced by American blacks, particularly in the early twentieth century, when the laws of the land permitted discriminatory practices. Particular clues that this is a southern black dialect include the contraction of “I is” (“I’se) meaning a mixture of “I am” and “I have”; the addition of the prefix “a-” to the word “climbin’” to indicate that the action is still going on; and the term of endearment “honey.” Independently, none of these stylistic traits would be enough to identify the speaker’s culture, but Hughes does such a thorough job of weaving a pattern together, that even a reader who is unfamiliar with the author’s racial background would get a sense of who the poem’s speaker is.

The difficulties faced by the mother in this poem are symbolized by tacks, splinters, bare floors, and dark hallways — all signs of poverty. In associating this particular black American speaker with these particular images, Hughes is able to hint at the injustice in the relationship between poverty and race. This mother certainly is not poor because she is lazy or weak-willed, since we can see her determination to work and succeed in almost every line. For a woman of such determination to be kept this poor indicates that hardship is not a moral issue, but is related to an external cause, such as the limits that are put on people because of their race.

Individual Vs. the Universe

The point that the mother is making in this poem is that life is a struggle and that her son would be mistaken to expect anything better than difficulty. She mentions symbols of her struggle that reflect her own life, apparently to show that she knows the subject from firsthand experience, thus assuring him that his own problems are not being unfairly apportioned to him and him alone. Because she has to explain this to her son as if it is news to him, we can assume that she was not the type of person to complain about her troubles while her son was growing up: he might easily have interpreted her quietness as a sign that she was comfortable with her life and, from this, assumed that her life indeed was a crystal stair. She addresses him in this poem in order to correct any mistaken assumption he may have that life should be free of problems just because hers has seemed to be so. In the implied fact that the mother has accepted her difficulties so quietly that her own son was unaware of them and has to have them explained to him, Hughes has raised a few philosophic issues about mankind’s relationship to the universe. The most obvious one is that of struggle. When the mother says “Life for me ain’t been no crystal stair,” we can assume that the same would hold true for many, if not most, honest, hard-working people. The second lesson that is implied here is that we should bear suffering quietly and not draw attention to it. The mother in this poem does not tell her son this directly, but Hughes obviously intends for us to admire her and to learn from the fact that her life’s difficulty had been quietly accepted.

Identity

If the son being addressed in this poem hopes to deny that his situation will be different than the one that is described to him (as seems to be his mother’s point in describing her situation at all), it will not be easy: too much connects his own identity to his mother for him to think that life will be very different for him. Usually in human affairs the fates of two family members will turn out more alike than the fates of random strangers. Psychologists explain similarities in families with a range of theories that all touch upon the famed “nature/nurture” argument: that is, different opinions stress whether relatives have similar experiences because they are taught (or “nurtured”) to behave in similar ways or because their behaviors are determined by their genetic code (their “nature”). The use of an African-American dialect in this poem highlights the idea that the son should expect certain difficulties, because to some extent society treated all blacks the same. But the fact that it is his mother speaking tells him, and us, that the struggle ahead of him is not just a theory but is his fate.

A more complete identification between the speaker and the intended audience would exist if this poem were “Father to Son.” Hughes apparently wanted to make use of the inherent contrast caused by crossing the experienced party in the parent/child relationship with the traditionally “weaker” gender in the male/female relationship. Sons often feel protective of their mothers, but mothers are always more worldly. If the speaker of this poem had been the son’s father, he may not have needed to explain the difficulty of his life, because the son would have identified more completely with the older man and known about his life without being told. But our society creates so much distance between the two genders that this son apparently could not identify with his mother’s quiet determination, instead mistaking it for acceptance.