Hear Dylan Thomas Recite His Classic Poem, “Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night”

As a young child, Dylan Thomas enjoyed listening to his father, David John Thomas, reading Shakespeare to him before bedtime. Despite his limited understanding at that age, the boy was captivated by the beautiful language. David John Thomas, who worked as an English teacher at a grammar school in southern Wales, harboured a deep desire to pursue a career as a poet, feeling dissatisfied with his current circumstances.

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.

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