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Thomas wrote “Do not go gentle into that good night” as a villanelle, which means he chose to work within a rigidly controlled rhyme scheme. Traditionally, the villanelle form requires a poet to limit themself to just two rhymes for the entire poem. These rhymes repeat across the five tercets and the concluding quatrain, following a patterned schema: ABA ABA ABA ABA ABAA. As you can see from this schema, the A rhymes dominate the poem, and they are associated with the villanelle’s two repeating refrains: “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). All the other A rhymes end in the same “-ight” sound: for example, “right” (line 4), “bright” (line 7), “flight” (line 10), and so on. Likewise, the B rhymes, which appear in the middle of each tercet, all end with the same “-ay” sound: for example, “day” (line 2), “they” (line 5), “bay” (line 8), and so on. The rigorous simplification of the rhyme scheme creates a sense of obsessive focus. It’s as though the speaker has only one message that they drive home again and again through the patterning of repeated sounds.

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