Do Not Go Quietly Into That Good Night?

Dylan Thomas once said of himself, "I hold a beast, an angel, and a madman in me, and my enquiry is as to their working, and my problem is their subjugation and victory, downthrow and upheaval, and my effort is their self-expression." Thomas was one of the best-known British poets of the twentieth century and is best remembered for his powerful poetry readings over BBC radio and his amusing tales and plays, as well as his highly publicized personal life.

Thomas possessed tremendous talent and was blessed with immense gifts that made him a professional success at a relatively young age, however, his personal life was often disappointing and his relationships were more often than not in a state of shambles.

Some believe these failures were rooted in his inability to cope with the demands of sudden fame as perhaps explained by the "various ways his personality have been described: alternately as humble, shy, confused and insecure on the inside, but outwardly neglectful, selfish, and egotistical, yet always and extremely, charming." A controversial figure to the end, Dylan Thomas left behind legacy of critically acclaimed literary works.

Dylan Marlais Thomas was born on October 27, 1914, in Swansea in southern Wales. His mother, Florence, was a housewife, and David John, his father, an English Literature teacher at Swansea Grammar School, both from Welsh backgrounds with dozens of relatives in surrounding towns and villages who were heavily influenced by religion and tradition. A precocious child with pretty blond curls, Dylan soon found he could get away with many things and apparently never hesitated to take advantage of it. He was exposed to poetry at the early age of two by his father, and by four, he was reciting verses from Shakespeare. Perhaps it was this early exposure to poetry that instilled in him a fascination for words, as he once wrote:

The first poems I knew were nursery rhymes, and before I could read them for myself I had come to love just the words of them, the words alone...the very sound of them as I heard them for the first time...and those words were, to me, as the notes of bells, the sounds of musical instruments, the noises of wind, sea, and rain, the rattle of milkcarts, the clapping of hooves on cobbles, the fingering of branches on a window pane, might be to someone deaf from birth, who has miraculously found his hearing."

Thomas was writing his own poetry by the age of eight and by sixteen had dropped out of Swansea Grammar School to pursue his career by working at the South Wales Daily Post writing reviews and critiques of local plays and concerts. During this time he gained a reputation for telling stories, offbeat jokes and obscene limericks in the local pubs, and for insisting on reading his poems aloud rather than allowing them to be read.

By 1933, his work was being published in literary magazines and by 1934, his first book of poem, '18 Poems' was published. In 1937 he recorded his first broadcast for the BBC and by 1950, his fame had grown so that he was asked to tour the United States on a lecture circuit traveling coast-to-coast from New York to California, "giving readings at over forty universities, schools and colleges." His offstage behavior became a public scandal as his drunken antics shocked and outraged many critics. Nevertheless, his 'Collected Poems' were published in 1952 and was hailed as a major literary achievement and was awarded the William Foyle Poetry Prize that year and the Etna-Taormina International Prize in 1953.

In December 1952, after a long illness, Thomas' father died as Dylan was holding his hand and the strong emotions of the experience is said to have contributed to the writing of his two most well-known poems, 'Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night' and his unfinished 'Elegy.' Thomas was at the peak of his career in 1953, with personal appearances, television appearances, poetry recordings, and book sales, however, his personal life was a tragedy. He and his wife were again separated, he was said to be having an affair while in the United States, and his drinking was out of control and left him vomiting and he constantly complained of fatigue. While in New York, he began receiving cortisone injections as a treatment for his illness and fatigue and after another shot during the early morning hours of November 4, 1953 he became delirious and the vomiting increased. A doctor was summoned who injected him with "half-a-grain of morphine," which doctors now confirm was at least three times the appropriate dose and by the following morning Thomas had fallen into a coma. He was taken to St. Vincent's Hospital on November 5th and died four days later, November 9, 1953 at the age of 39.

Having examined the life of Thomas and the influence his father had upon his passion for poetry and prose, it is easier to read the meanings behind the lines of his poem, 'Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night.' Jonathan Westphal in his critical essay published in 'The Explicator' explains that to appreciate the poem as a whole, one must understand line 16, 'And you, my father, there on the sad height,' which Westphal calls a "mysterious and melancholy phrase." Westphal believes that Thomas' emotions were more fierce and complex than most critics credit. Westphal says that most often it is suggested that 'the sad height' is a bier, however, he believes that Thomas was "advocating active resistance to death immediately before death, not sad mourning after it."

Westphal asks to consider the moments at which the realizations of the four classes of men and of old age take place in the poem:

old age at close of day wise men at their end good men the last wave by wild men too late grave men near death" and stresses that line 16 is part of the sequence and rather than being a place, such as a bier, it refers to a time, metaphorical plateau of aloneness and loneliness before death ('near death')...it is not the end of life, the moment of death, or a time beyond it, but the ending of life at their end'), a phenomenologically distinct period ('at close of day') before death when it is seen, at last ('the last wave by'), to be inevitable ('too late')."