I watched my own father go gentle into that good night. I
will tell you about it, but not just yet.
Dylan Thomas was a young man when he wrote his famous
villanelle. For that matter, he was only 39 when he died. Poets.org describes
him as “the archetypal Romantic poet of the popular American imagination,”
which seems a bit sardonic. Nevertheless, “Do not go gentle into that good
night” deserves its fame, taking a form so prone to become sing-song silliness
and elevating it to the point where everyone else should just stop writing
villanelles (please), as D.T. did it to perfection.
That said, like many a famous English Lit poem, it is often
misread. Just as Robert Frost’s “The road not taken” has become the anthem of
misguided would-be nonconformists (yet even the title itself tells another
story – look at the whole poem, folks, and think about it some), Thomas’s
poem somehow makes some readers believe that angry-young-man-rage is the
antidote to meek submission.
Folks. Look at the whole poem.
First off, and every teacher of literature has said this so
many times it ought to be its own villanelle refrain: “Do not mistake the author of a
verse / for its speaker, for oh! Nothing is worse.” Poets, I daresay, rarely
give advice. Even if they did, you’d do well to take it warily – Dylan
Thomas’s author photograph alone requires an MPA content warning (cigarette
smoking!). Does Thomas really want his father to sit bolt upright on his deathbed,
shake tight fists at the heavens, and roar curses that bring the poem’s MPA
rating up to R? Even if we separate poet from poem’s speaker, who would
want that? Is impotent rage really so much better than yielding acceptance of
the inevitable?
These were not questions that occurred to me when I thought
about this poem after my father’s passing. What occurred to me is harder to
describe – which is perhaps one reason we have poets.
I say this to everyone who sends condolences: he went
peacefully, without pain, in a familiar setting with his family right with him.
It’s all true, and it describes possibly the best scenario in which you could
ever lose an elderly loved one. There’s a little more to it than that; it was
peaceful because he was heavily medicated for pain, and indeed in the days
before his death he was unresponsive to his caregivers and his daughters. I
sang him his favorite Hawaiian song, and I thanked him for being my father; it’s
nice to think he heard, but I know I did it mostly just for me.
The biggest surprise to me was that he looked somehow –
beautiful. Skin and bones, but also the strange dignity of an entombed pharaoh.
It was not difficult to watch him dying, and then to see him newly dead.
Moments before the end, he moved his jaw up and down one last time, as if
trying to speak. He wasn’t; the hospice nurse had told us that was likely to
happen, an autonomic reaction to the end. And then he went, gently.
The best possible ending. And yet I can imagine Thomas’s
speaker thinking – raging – is that it? Is that all he comes to, all we
come to? He’s just going to slip away without another word, without
acknowledging my presence, until he’s no longer a presence himself? A father
– authoritative, powerful, at times scary – is giving up, fading away. A young
man would hate that. Maybe everyone hates it at some level. To do otherwise is
to admit our own helplessness.
Funny thing, I don’t think I’ve ever seen my father truly
enraged. Mom, yeah, for sure – she was a very angry person a lot of the
time. Dad was frustrated, discouraged, disgusted (the last few months of his life gave him plenty of current events for that), and sometimes angry, but his anger was
never a blazing inferno like hers was. And yet when I think of him, his life,
it’s a long steady burn, a “blaze like meteors,” as the poem says, with an after
image that continues to burn.
https://poets.org/poem/do-not-go-gentle-good-night
