Dylan Thomas's “Do not go gentle into that good night” has been noted to bear the influence of and even echo W. B. Yeats, especially “Lapis Luzuli,” and, secondarily via this poem, Shakespeare's King Lear. One scholar notes its “Yeatsian overtones” (Fraser 51); another judges Thomas's villanelle to have “much of the concentrated fury of expression which the poetry of the older Yeats contained, but … more tenderness and sympathy” (Stanford 117), and goes on to say, citing “Lapis Lazuli,” that “Yeats described the poet as one who knows that ‘Hamlet and Lear are gay’” (118). William York Tindall cites not only “Lapis Lazuli” but also Yeats's “The Choice” as sources (204). Another scholar seems to skip over Yeats entirely (though his own phrasing echoes line 1 of “Lapis Lazuli”), seeing the “Grave men/blind” tercet (which contains the injunction to “be gay”) as “perhaps invok[ing] the Miltonic” (Tindall also mentions Milton 205) and the effect of the phrase “be gay” as “rather hysterical sentimentality” (Holbrook, Dissociation 53); of the earlier “Wise men/lightning” verse, however, he says “The images are merely there, histrionically, to bring in the phrase ‘forked no lightning’ to give a Lear-like grandeur to the dirge” (52).

I would like to propose that “Do not go gentle into that good night” bears a much stronger and more direct connection to Shakespeare's play than is suggested by references to Yeats or to “Lear-like grandeur.” I would like to propose that the attitudes towards death—or, more precisely, the attitudes towards how one lives in the face of impending death—that Thomas explores in this poem—the implied attitude his speaker attributes to his direct audience, and the one he urges be adopted in its place—are similarly explored in King Lear and dramatized in the characters of Gloucester and Lear. I also propose that the voice we hear in “Do not go gentle” may not be a directly lyric speaker but an obliquely drawn persona, that of Gloucester's son Edgar. Further, when read in the shadow cast by King Lear, the tone of Thomas's poem grows dark indeed.

“Do not go gentle into that good night” is addressed to Thomas's father, David John, known as D. J. According to biographer Paul Ferris, D. J. was “an unhappy man … a man with regrets” (27); born with brains and literary talent, his ambition was to be a man of letters, but he was never able to advance beyond being “a sardonic provincial schoolmaster” in South Wales, feared for his sharp tongue (26-33). After his first serious illness, though—cancer in 1933—“A mellowing is said to have been noticeable soon after; his sarcasm was not so sharp; he was a changed man” (104). As he grew more chronically ill in the 40s, mostly from heart disease and with one of the complications being trouble with his sight, the mellowing intensified: As Ferris puts it, “It must have been [D. J.'s] backbone of angry dignity that his son grieved to see breaking long after, when he wrote ‘Do not go gentle into that good night’ (27), and the poem is “an exhortation to his father, a plea for him to die with anger, not humility” (259).

The poem was first published in November, 1951, in Princess Caetani's Botteghe Oscure, on consecutive pages with “Lament,” a dramatic monologue spoken by an old man on his deathbed who recalls his rollicking youth and middle-age spent in the pursuit (and capture) of wine, women, and song, but who has married at last in order to obtain a caretaker, and must suffer pious comforting in his final, helpless days. (Bibliographic evidence suggests the two were also composed, or at least finalized, more or less simultaneously; Kidder 188.) In the letter to Caetani that contained “Do not go gentle,” Thomas remarked that “this little one might well be printed with [“Lament”] as a contrast” (qtd. in Kidder 188).

As Ferris suggests, it would be difficult to over-estimate D. J.'s influence on his son: “… the pattern of [Dylan's] life was in some measure a response to D. J. Thomas and his wishes. For the early books that Dylan Thomas read, the rhythms he absorbed, and probably for his obsession with the magic of the poet's function, he was indebted to D. J.” (283). Prominent among those “early books” read by Thomas are the works of Shakespeare. In 1948 (and Thomas might have begun his, as usual, protracted drafting and revision of “Do not go gentle” in 1945, after D. J. suffered a nearly fatal illness; Tindall 204), Thomas wrote a journalist that D. J.'s “reading aloud of Shakespeare seemed to me, and to nearly every other boy in the school, very grand indeed; all the boys who were with me at school, and who have spoken to me since, agree that it was his reading that made them, for the first time, see that there was, after all, something in Shakespeare and all his poetry …” (qtd. in Ferris 33; his ellipses). That Thomas was familiar with and admiring of Shakespeare is, of course, no surprise, but his direct linkage of his father with Shakespeare, particularly at this point in time, is interesting, and he demonstrated more than familiarity with King Lear: In 1950, during one of his reading tours in America, he spent an evening with novelist Peter de Vries (who would later use Thomas as the basis for the poet Gowan McGland in Reuben, Reuben) and, among other conversational gambits, “declaimed some Lear” (de Vries, qtd. in Ferris 233). That he was equally well-immersed in Yeats is verified by the fact that poems by Yeats were among those he performed on his 1950 tour of America (Ferris 239 note 6).

Such biographical information takes on more significance than simple background when considered in conjunction with the two final stanzas of “Do not go gentle”:

Grave men, near death, who see with blinding sight
Blind eyes could blaze like meteors and be gay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
And you, my father, there on that sad height,
Curse, bless, me now with your fierce tears, I pray.
Do not go gentle into that good night.
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

(13-19)

The clearest poetic debts owed by these lines are, as is often noted, to “Lapis Lazuli” and Yeats's use of Hamlet and King Lear to illustrate his argument that individual destruction or the destruction of whole civilizations is not the end of the world, but the way of the world:

All perform their tragic play,
There struts Hamlet, there is Lear,
That's Ophelia, that Cordelia;
Yet they, should the last scene be there,
The great stage curtain about to drop,
If worthy their prominent part in the play,
Do not break up their lines to weep.
They know that Hamlet and Lear are gay;
Gaiety transfiguring all that dread.
All men have aimed at, found, and lost;
Black out; Heaven blazing into the head:
Tragedy wrought to its uttermost.
Though Hamlet rambles and Lear rages,
And all the drop-scenes drop at once
Upon a hundred thousand stages,
It cannot grow by an inch or an ounce.
.....All things fall and are built again,
And those that build them again are gay.

(9-24, 35-36)

The linguistic and imagistic ties are very strong: the use of the words “gay” and “rage/rages” (from Lear raging on the heath, III.ii); Yeats's “Heaven blazing into the head” is picked up by Thomas in “Blind eyes could blaze like meteors”; and there is a hint of “Do not go gentle into that good night” in Yeats's “Do not break up their lines to weep,” with Yeats's “weep” again possibly echoed in Thomas's “fierce tears.” (I should also note that in some notes toward his unfinished “Elegy” for D. J., Thomas wrote, “His mother said that as a baby he never cried; nor did he, as an old man” [qtd. in Ferris 27].) Also, Yeats's use of the theatrical and military term “Black out” might be part of the impetus toward Thomas's “the dying of the light” metaphor.

Thematically, besides the issue of being gay and/or raging in the face of extinction, Yeats's statement that “All men have aimed at, found, and lost” can be seen to underlie all four of Thomas's “body” stanzas. Stanzas 2 and 3 deal with men who have failed to achieve the ends they “have aimed at,” either “Because their words had forked no lightning” (5), had not, even momentarily, lit up the world (and, I would suggest, like lightning been noted and wondered at by the world); or because their “frail deeds,” done in the hurly-burly of the open sea and not the sheltered confines of “a green bay,” never “danced” (8). Stanzas 4 and 5 deal with men who have actually “found,” or achieved their aims, but bitterly regret their success: “Wild men,” who indeed “caught … the sun,” regret “they grieved it on its way” (10-11) by wasting their own and perhaps others' lives in their hedonistic pursuits; and “Grave men,” who may have spent their lives in the gloomy contemplation of life's sorrows, regret that their melancholy focus made them blind to the possibility of experiencing, to apply Yeats, “Gaiety [amidst] all that dread.”

Three key elements of the last two stanzas do not seem to find genesis in “Lapis Lazuli,” though, but to lead farther back, to King Lear itself and to Gloucester, Edgar, and Lear: blind eyes (though the “ancient, glittering eyes” [56] of Yeats's Chinamen might suggest these), the “sad height,” and the speaker's prayer that his father “Curse, bless” him.

It would be odd if Thomas, who so focused on the failing vision of D. J. that for years he exaggerated how bad it was (Ferris 366), and echoing a poem that deals with King Lear and imminent death, did not think of Gloucester, whose eyes are torn out by Cornwall and Regan. Another (though I think more tenuous) physical parallel is that D. J.'s primary ailment was heart disease, and ultimately it is the bursting of his “flaw'd heart” (V.iii.197) that kills Gloucester. There are also similarities in personality: D. J., the man with the feared tongue, mellowed as he aged and grew increasingly ill; early on, and in terms reminiscent of those used by “the old ram rod” speaker of Thomas's “Lament,” Gloucester is a man capable of making ribald witticisms, in front of Edmund, about the “good sport” he had at the making of his “whoreson” (I.i.123-24), and capable of towering anger, as when he swiftly condemns to death his legitimate son, Edgar. His blinding, though, quickly alters him, and he becomes filled with regret and self-pity—“O dear son Edgar, / The food of thy abused father's wrath!” (IV.i.21-22); “As flies to wanton boys are we to th' gods, / They kill us for their sport” (IV.i.36-37)—and ultimately a despair that leads him to attempt suicide at Dover, utterly reversing the defiant man who, just before Cornwall tore out his eyes, cried, “I am tied to th' stake, and I must stand the course” (III.vii.54).

The Dover cliff scene is key to the imagery of the last stanza of “Do not go gentle” and to the impetus of the poem as a whole. Gloucester, preparing (as he thinks) to hurl himself off the cliff into the sea below, prays in terms similar to the acquiescence Thomas's speaker attributes to his subject audience, and in language echoed in line 2 of the poem (“Old age should burn and rave and close of day”):

                                        O you mighty gods!
This world I do renounce, and in your sights
Shake patiently my great affliction off.
If I could bear with your great opposeless wills,
My snuff and loathed part of nature should
Burn itself out. …

(IV.vi.34-39)

Also, the Dover cliff itself parallels Thomas's “sad height” (16), which Jonathan Westphal argues, I believe correctly, is “a metaphorical plateau of aloneness and loneliness before death … a moment in life represented as a place” (114-15). Being the “sad height” (my emphasis), it also paradoxically represents the apex of life achievement and, simultaneously, the end of life's potential.

A paradoxical situation, or perhaps in the context of both “Do not go gentle” and King Lear, more correctly a conflicted situation is also evident in the positions of the sons in both works, Thomas's speaker and Edgar, and here, I think, it is necessary to discuss Thomas's affinity for disguise. Paul Ferris points out that in both his life and his art, Thomas created for himself personas or disguises. In life, it was that of the “raconteur with the bellyful of beer” (76); he expended himself “manufacturing a character for the world to be entertained by, part-poet and part-clown; the two went together” (116). In his writing, “Disguises were part of his basic repertoire. He might be the landscape or the weather; he could be the foetus or the egg; he took on the role of The Poet or Man or Christ, separately or at the same time” (97). Interestingly, particularly in regard to the relationship between Edgar and the speaker of “Do not go gentle,” Ferris notes that madness “fascinated” Thomas and that one likely persona is the madman in the story “The Mouse and the Woman” (128).

David Holbrook perceives something similar to a persona in “Do not go gentle,” “a pose struck to disguise the true feelings” (Dissociation 53), though he sees no uncertainty in the underlying feelings, which he calls “a fierce hatred, a wish that the father should suffer more, because otherwise he is not yielding sufficient spiritual substance for his son, but betraying him by his inadequacy” (Code 197). However, Ferris speculates that Thomas's life persona was “a convenient disguise for someone who is uncertain of himself, who has trouble establishing his true identity. There are ample indications that Thomas was an unsure, divided man” (76), and I see such a lack of surety leading to disguise in the speaker of “Do not go gentle,” a perception reinforced by knowing that Thomas was focused on dramatized speakers when he composed the poem, because at the same time he was writing the dramatic monologue “Lament,” and he himself suggested (successfully) that the two poems be published as a pair (Kidder 188).

At least initially, though, Edgar does not appear to share the uncertainty of Thomas's speaker. Edgar, in disguise as Mad Tom (whose improvised autobiography as a self-centered hedonist in III.iv.85-94 is very reminiscent of the “Wild men” of Thomas's fourth stanza, and of Thomas himself), fools Gloucester into believing he is at the cliff's edge when he is actually nowhere near it, and says in an aside that “… I do trifle thus with his despair / … to cure it” (IV.vi.33-34). For Edgar, at least at this point in the play, there seems to be little self-doubt about the propriety of his course of action in prolonging his father's life and consequent suffering. Indeed, he's something of a Pollyanna: After meeting Lear on the heath, he notes “the mind much sufferance doth o'erskip, / When grief hath mates, and bearing fellowship. / How light and portable my pain seems now, / When that which makes me bend makes the King bow …” (III.vi.106-09). And, just prior to meeting his blinded father, he remarks in Yeatsian fashion that “To be worst, / The lowest and most dejected thing of fortune, / Stands still in esperance, lives not in fear. / The lamentable change is from the best, / The worst returns to laughter” (IV.i.2-6). Edgar's emphasis on perseverance survives meeting his maimed father, though the hope of “laughter” to come seems abated. After the abortive suicide attempt and in yet another disguise, he convinces Gloucester that it was a “fiend” (IV.vi.72), a devil-monster that had led him physically to the cliff, and metaphorically led him to the evil attempt on his own life, and “that the clearest gods, who make them honors / Of men's impossibilities, have preserved thee” (IV.vi.73-74). Gloucester resolves “Henceforth [to] bear / Affliction till it do cry out itself / ‘Enough, enough,’ and die” (IV.vi.75-77), a sentiment Edgar approves and later encapsulates in the precept “Ripeness is all” (V.ii.11).

Thomas's speaker in “Do not go gentle” is neither so firm in purpose nor so sure of the righteousness of his position, and neither was Thomas: In the letter submitting the poem for publication, Thomas noted in a postscript that “the only person I can't show the little enclosed poem to is, of course, my father, who doesn't know he's dying” (Letters 359), which rather limited the efficacy of the appeal so far as D. J. was concerned. Within the poem, the final stanza distills the conflict between the urging of a blazing defiance of death's closing off of possibility, and the underlying recognition of the futility of that defiance, that it is “too late” (11) to do anything about the failures and mistakes in life because there is no suggestion, however much they burn, rave, and rage, that wise men shall ever fork lightning with their words, good men see their deeds succeed, wild men find (and perhaps give) joy rather than grief, or grave men be gay.

The speaker of “Do not go gentle” is caught between his desire that his father continue to live, and live vividly, and his recognition that death is “that good night,” perhaps inherently “good” because it is the order of life / nature, perhaps more immediately “good” as the agent for stopping pain, whether physical, mental, or spiritual. This conflict is present in the image of the “sad height,” and cries out from the speaker's contradictory request that his father “Curse, bless, me now with your fierce tears, I pray” (17). In King Lear, Edgar, in recounting his father's last moments, remarks (albeit in reference to himself, not Gloucester, who never quite gave up on the hope of dying with dispatch; see IV.vi.230-31 and V.ii.8) about “our lives' sweetness! / That we the pain of death would hourly die / Rather than die at once” (V.iii.185-87) and tells how he “Never (O fault!) reveal'd [himself] unto [Gloucester], / Until some half hour past …” when he “ask'd his blessing. … / … But his flaw'd heart / (Alack, too weak the conflict to support!) / ‘Twixt two extremes of passion, joy and grief, / Burst smilingly” (V.iii.186-200). In these lines are found the conflict between extreme urges as well as the request, with a sense of guilty regret, for a blessing.

The requested “Curse” and the “fierce tears” are, however, I think drawn from a separate source within the play, from the direct model for the “Old age” that burns and raves and rages: Lear himself. Old, stripped of his life's labors and honors, even of his sanity, Lear will not go gently. On the heath he rants for vengeance (III.ii) and later vows “when I have stol'n upon these son-in-laws, / Then kill, kill, kill, kill, kill, kill!” (IV.vi.186-87) Even when he and Cordelia are made captive by their enemies, he promises “we'll wear out, / In a wall'd prison, packs and sects of great ones, / … / The good years shall devour them, flesh and fell, / Ere they shall make us weep! We'll see ‘em starved first” (V.iii.17-18, 24-25). And, at his very end, he has fire enough to kill Cordelia's executioner and take pride in the futile, “too late” act, and his very last words voice the mad conviction that Cordelia still lives.

Lear recognizes, though, the pain of life, seeing himself “bound / Upon a wheel of fire, that mine own tears / Do scald like molten lead” (IV.vii.45-47), and these may well be the “fierce tears” Thomas's speaker urges from his father, and the reason why he sees them as not only blessing, but cursing: Not wanting to believe Lear has died, Edgar beseeches, “Look up, my lord” (V.iii.313). But Kent replies, “Vex not his ghost. O, let him pass, he hates him / That would upon the rack of this tough world / Stretch him out longer” (V.iii.314-16).

The philosophical conflict between Edgar and Gloucester, and briefly but tellingly between Edgar and Kent, finds a single and unresolvedly conflicted voice in the speaker of “Do not go gentle into that good night.” There is no hint either in the poem or in Shakespeare's play of the seeming optimism of Yeats's “Lapis Lazuli,” but the darkness inherent in Thomas's poem can too easily be obscured by the force of his voice acting on a hopeful audience, and by its echoes of Yeats—obscured, that is, until we set “Do not go gentle” in palimpset with King Lear. Thematically, imagistically, and linguistically, Thomas's poem looks back clearly, but darkly, through and past “Lapis Lazuli” to King Lear, and Thomas, who worked so hard at creating his public persona of the bohemian poet, found a familiar in the role-playing Edgar. Both urge their fathers on to life, but Thomas is far less sanguine. He cannot, for all the burning, dispel the dark.

Works Cited

Ferris, Paul. Dylan Thomas. New York: Dial, 1977.

Fraser, G. S. Vision and Rhetoric. London: Faber, 1959: 211-41. Rpt. as “Dylan Thomas.” A Casebook on Dylan Thomas. Ed. John Malcolm Brinnin. New York: Crowell, 1960: 34-58.

Holbrook, David. Dylan Thomas: The Code of the Night. London: Athlone, 1972.

———. Dylan Thomas and Poetic Dissociation. London: Southern Illinois UP, 1964.

Kidder, Rushworth M. Dylan Thomas: The Country of the Spirit. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1973.

Shakespeare, William. King Lear. 1604-05. The Riverside Shakespeare. Ed. G. Blakemore Evans. Boston: Houghton, 1974.

Stanford, Derek. Dylan Thomas: A Literary Study. London: Spearman, 1964.

Thomas, Dylan. “Do not go gentle into that good night.” The Collected Poems of Dylan Thomas. New York: New Directions, 1953: 128.

———. “Lament.” Collected Poems: 194-96.

———. Selected Letters of Dylan Thomas. Ed. Constantine Fitzgibbon. New York: New Directions, 1965.

Tindall, William York. A Reader's Guide to Dylan Thomas. New York: Farrar, 1962.

Westphal, Jonathan. “Thomas's ‘Do not go gentle into that goodnight.’” The Explicator 52.2 (1994): 113-15.

Yeats, William Butler. “Lapis Lazuli.” Selected Poems and Two Plays of William Butler Yeats, Ed. M. L. Rosenthal. New York: Collier, 1966: 159-60.