Dylan Thomas/ Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night
Table of contents for Dylan Thomas
- Dylan Thomas/ Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night
- Dylan Thomas (part II)/ Rage Against the Dying of the Light
Worked as a newspaper reporter
Discovered through a poetry contest in a popular newspaper.
Published Eighteen Poems.
Noted for strange violent imagery and powerfully suggestive obscurity.
New strength and romantic picturesqueness restored to English poetry?
Post TS Eliot neo-Romantic movement afoot? No.
He becomes known as a master craftsman and not a shouting rhapsodist.
Images carefully ordered.
He saw the workings of biology as a magical transformation process.
He saw men and women locked in a round of identities.
Closely woven imagery derived from the Bible, Welsh folklore, preaching and Freud.
He read all of DH Lawrence as a young man.
And he wrote Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dog.
He was a brilliant talker and a very entertaining reader of poetry.
His poetry readings in the US between 1950 and 1953 were enormously popular.
He loved to drink and was impulsive, reckless.
He died suddenly in New York November 1953 age 39 due to “an insult to the brain” (alcohol).
He played the wild bohemian poet as it had not been played since the 1890’s.
As time goes on it is clear that he was at his best an original poet of great power and beauty.
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.
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