Do not go gentle into that good night (Dylan Thomas)

Do not go gentle into that good night (do check out the audio recording on the page too. It's wonderful!) by Dylan Thomas was probably the first poem I ever remember analyzing. Well, kind of.

My mom and I were at home and I was reading her the poem - we had read it in school maybe or perhaps it was in a book I took from the self. I was in 6th or 7th grade and was reciting it because it sounded neat - with all the repetition (hey, hey villanelle!).

I had finished the poem and then my mom asked "what do you think it means?". No one had asked me so bluntly - in school whenever we did a unit on poetry it was to identify the similes or count the number of metaphors or something like that.

I faltered and then haltingly, sputtered "Um, (big uncertain pause) .......death?"

And ding, ding, ding, correct! And fathers/sons and old age and missed chances and regrets and funerals and grief and love.

Do you remember when you first (or early on) took a stab at poetry analysis? What poem got you going?

Favorite line: "Because their words had forked no lightning they / Do not go gentle into that good night."

Light breaks where no sun shines (Dylan Thomas)

Light breaks where no sun shines by Dylan Thomas: HOPE.

Favorite line: "The secret of the soil grows through the eye"

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"