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Dylan Thomas, “Do not go gentle into that good night”

Both of Thomas’s poems exhibit powerful meditations on death, and for this reason they should be read together. Yet despite their apparently shared refusal of death, the poems ultimately have very different thematic points of emphasis. The similarities as well as differences make them worthy of close comparison.

Louise Glück, “The Wild Iris”

“And death shall have no dominion” shares with Glück’s “The Wild Iris” an ultimate vision of death as a transient phase in the broader dominion of existence. Pairing these poems could therefore prove very generative.

William Blake, Songs of Innocence & Experience

Thomas was deeply influenced by the poetry of William Blake, that early British Romantic who stands out for both his moral commitment and his radical cosmic visions. It might be most productive to compare the imagery in Thomas’s poem to that found in Blake’s “Auguries of Innocence” (ca. 1803). However, much of what’s characteristic of Blake’s work may also be found in the poems collected in Songs of Innocence & Experience (1789).

William Wordsworth, “Ode: Intimations of Immortality”

It would be worth comparing “And death shall have no dominion” to the work of another British Romantic from whom Thomas drew inspiration: William Wordsworth. Since Thomas wrote his poem on the theme of immortality, it would be particularly generative to read Wordsworth’s own treatment of the subject, in “Intimations of Immortality” (1807).

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