Dylan Thomas wrote “Do not go gentle into that good night” in 1951, during the turbulent final years of his life. In writing the poem, Thomas used a highly structured poetic form known as a villanelle. The villanelle form was first developed in France by the seventeenth-century poet Jean Passerat. Despite this early origin, the villanelle didn’t have its heyday until the 1890s, when aesthetic formalism was all the rage among British poets. But by the time Thomas wrote this poem, the rigidly structured villanelle had long been out of fashion. Indeed, modernist poets in the first decades of the twentieth century had disdained such rigid forms. But Thomas, rejecting the modernist obsession with the new, bravely returned to the form and penned what is probably the most famous villanelle in the English language. The speaker of this poem addresses their father, who is presumably elderly and nearing death. Throughout the poem, the speaker repeatedly calls on their father to resist the finality of death and strain to remain among the living. The speaker drives this message home with the two refrains that, customary to the villanelle form, repeat in a structured pattern throughout: “Do not go gentle into that good night” (lines 1, 6, 12, and 18) and “Rage, rage against the dying of the light” (lines 3, 9, 15, and 19).

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