31 pages • 1 hour read
Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night
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Background
Authorial Context
As discussed elsewhere in this guide, the speaker of “Do not go gentle in that good night” reveals at the end of the poem that they are addressing their father. If the reader presumes that the speaker of the poem is the poet himself, an exploration of Dylan Thomas’s relationship with his own father at the time of his father’s death illuminates the emotional depth of the poem and the urgent tone with which the speaker commands their audience to resist their own mortality.
Thomas’s father, David John Thomas, known as D.J., introduced Thomas to poetry. A Senior English Master with an Honors degree in English from Aberystwyth University, D.J. taught at the Swansea Grammar School. D.J. Thomas immersed himself in literature, and the family home was full of books, giving Dylan Thomas early exposure to literature. From an early age, Thomas read his father’s books, a part of his childhood experience to which Thomas referred in several interviews.
D.J. Thomas lived with poor health for many years, and in 1933, when Dylan Thomas was 19 years old, he was diagnosed with cancer of the throat. The treatment for this kind of cancer at this time was painful, involving courses of radium needles to fight the disease. These events affected Thomas deeply, and though he carried on writing poetry, the tone of his work changed, indicating the power of Thomas’s emotional response to his father’s debilitating disease.
As D.J. Thomas’s health deteriorated further, he began to lose his eyesight, an event to which Thomas refers twice in “Do not go gentle into that good night.” In the fifth stanza of the poem, his speaker describes the experience of “Grave men” (Line 13) who are closest to death and able to “see with blinding sight” (Line 13). The next line follows with a comparison of “Blind eyes” (Line 14) to “meteors” (Line 14). This biographical details calls into question the matter of the poet’s audience. From an authorial perspective, Thomas may have written the poem specifically for his father, to encourage his father at a difficult time, rather than for a broader reading audience.
Literary Context
To many literary scholars, Dylan Thomas represents the neo-romantic trends of the 1940’s in literature. Though neo-romanticism is not precisely a literary movement itself, it did name an artistic response and reaction against intellectualism and realism. Dylan Thomas, a prominent poet and neo-romantic representative, led the movement towards writing about one’s internal observations of the world in which he and other poets lived.
Many of Thomas’s other poems contain evidence of his reliance on his internal world as a way to communicate his lived experience. Imagination and intuition play significant roles in his poetry, as well as his appreciation of nature and the natural processes of life. It is notable, then, that in “Do not go gentle into that good night,” the dominant message of the poem involves resistance to the natural processes of death. As previously discussed in the Authorial Context section, Thomas’s attachment to his father and his consequent emotion as a result of losing his father distracted him from his typically neo-romantic leanings towards idealizing nature and its processes.
As a neo-romantic, Thomas’s work and role in the Western literary canon is similar in many ways to that of English Romantic poet and artist William Blake. Thomas himself acknowledged that Blake was an important literary influence, and in many of Thomas’s poems, he uses archetypes in a similar way as Blake.
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