When Dylan Thomas was a little boy his father would read Shakespeare to him at bedtime. The boy loved the sound of the words, even if he was too young to understand the meaning. His father, David John Thomas, taught English at a grammar school in southern Wales but wanted to be a poet. He was bitterly disappointed with his station in life.
Many years later when the father lay on his deathbed, Dylan Thomas wrote a poem that captures the profound sense of empathy he felt for the dying old man. The poem, “Do not go gentle into that good night,” was written in 1951, only two years before the poet’s own untimely death at the age of 39. Despite the impossibility of escaping death, the anguished son implores his father to “Rage, rage against the dying of the light.”
The poem is a beautiful example of the villanelle form, which features two rhymes and two alternating refrains in verse arranged into five tercets, or three-lined stanzas, and a concluding quatrain in which the two refrains are brought together as a couplet at the very end. You can hear Thomas’s famous 1952 recital of the poem above. To see the poem’s structure and read along as you listen, click here to open the text in a new window.
And to hear more of Thomas reciting his own works (and more), please visit our prior post 8 Glorious Hours of Dylan Thomas Reading Poetry–His Own & Others’.
All poems have been added to our collection of Free Audio Books.
Note: an earlier version of this post originally appeared on our site in August 2012.
Related content:
Anthony Hopkins Reads ‘Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night’
Hear Dylan Thomas Read Three Poems by W.H. Auden, Including “September 1, 1939”
It seems to me that poem should be read with more passion and rage!