No, today’s edition of my newsletter is not about the motion picture Interstellar, although I will admit it was a fine film in terms of its plot and scientific accuracy. No, the image from the film depicts the moment when the well-aged sonorous tone of Michael Caine’s character’s voiceover narrates some of the tercets (three-line stanzas) from Dylan Thomas’s poem Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night. The only criticism I can level at the film was its use of only some lines of the poem, since Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night is a villanelle, a strictly patterned form of poetry. However, before I inform your minds of the formal style of a villanelle, it would be unseemly of me not to nourish them with every word of Dylan Thomas’ timeless poem and, of course, to discuss the poet’s life (or lack thereof). So here it is, in all poetic glory, Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night:

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.

Dylan Thomas was born in Swansea in 1914. He left school in 1932 to become a reporter for the South Wales Daily Post. Several of the approximately two hundred poems he wrote between 1931 and 1935 appeared in print while he was still a teenager, including one of his best known, And Death Shall Have No Dominion, which was published in May 1933. After moving to London, he met his wife, Caitlin Macnamara, a highly regarded author in her own right, and they had three children: Llewelyn, Aeronwy (who also became a highly regarded writer and poet in her lifetime), and Colm. Dylan Thomas struggled to earn a sustainable income from writing, a financial difficulty that he overcame by augmenting his income with reading tours and radio broadcasts. Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night was written by Thomas as he held a vigil over his dying father, so it was a very personal poem for him. Sadly, the drink and his reading tours were his nemesis, and his haphazard behaviour led to his untimely death in New York in 1953 while he was on his fourth reading trip. A brilliant poet, taken from the literature world too early, when one feels that his finest work was yet to come.

So now, we return to the wonderful poetry of the villanelle, a delicate yet beautiful art form of poetic expression when mastered, as Dylan Thomas did in Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night. As previously expressed herein, villanelles are written in tercets and follow an interlocking, repetitive structure. The first stanza of a villanelle is vital, as its first and third lines establish the two refrains (a line or group of lines that regularly repeat, usually at the end of a stanza in a poem) that will repeat throughout the poem. In the poem under reference, those two lines are “Do not go gentle into that good night” and “Rage, rage against the dying of the light.” This specific villanelle is also written in iambic (iamb is a two-syllable metrical pattern in poetry in which one unstressed syllable is followed by a stressed syllable) pentameter and follows the standard rhyming pattern for a villanelle, ABA. However, it’s in the delivery of the villanelle that its beauty is found, as you will hear in this link to Michael Sheen’s (the National Theatre) recital:

It is a sad irony of literature’s history that a poet’s desperate plea to his dying father to fight against the dying of the light should subsequently, and also tragically, witness that poet’s premature departure into that good night. Yet Dylan Thomas left behind a precious gem of poetic brilliance whose light will shine for eternity.