Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night (Dylan Thomas)

This poem by Dylan Thomas is very famous. I also remember it being one of (the?) first poem I ever thought about beyond the words being used. This may have been the first poem I ever really talked about.

I remember my mom at the stove and I standing, leaning, in the door frame between the kitchen and the living room. I forget why I was reading this poem. It might have been assigned for homework (this takes place in middle school, maybe 7th grade). But anyway, I read the poem aloud, exclaiming over how it all sounded and the fact that lines are repeated and wasn't that cool?

After I had gone on for a while about the coolness of the poem, my mom asked me what I thought it meant, what it referred to. I paused. I hadn't considered that, the most basic of questions. "Death," I ventured.

So, now I'd say it's about death, sure. But more importantly, it's about how people want and need to live life grandly and that their life can hardly be said to have lived at all unless one has "raged against the dying of the light."

Favorite line: "Wild men who caught and sang the sun in flight,/And learn, too late, they grieved it on its way"