Lisa Marie Galvan Rhetoric May 2, 2001 Life is Worth Fighting For          Dylan Thomas, author of "Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night," is a legendary Welsh poet, who at sixteen years old quit school, began working as a reporter and writer, and was a heavy drinker.  In addition to poetry, Thomas wrote radio scripts, film scenarios, and two plays.  According to William T. Moynihan, "Largely because of the legends and lies woven around his real character, he is today one of the most attractive figures in modern literature" (1).  Moynihan mentions that Thomas was a distinguished writer, a difficult poet, and had a remarkable public personality (vii).          One of Thomas's greatest influences in writing "Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night" was his father, D. J. Thomas.  It had been said that D. J. Thomas had great hopes for his son to have the academic career that he had been denied.  As Clark Mixon Emery mentions, " his father had had an early unrealized ambition as a poet. This revelation explained somewhat my feeling that Thomas's father looked upon him with as much curiosity as with pride" (53).  But Thomas had no inclination at all for study, and therefore was often absent and was listed at the bottom of his class in all subjects except English.  D. J. Thomas, with all his hard work, had failed in poetry, but his independent and careless son had succeeded.  "There was something respectful yet unmistakably distant and wary between the two men, something that made for a mutual lack of ease" (52-53).  Louis Aston Marantz Simpson recognizes, "Dylan knew nothing but poetry, which he got from his father, and only fine-sounding poetry at that" (10).  Despite his success, Thomas was always affected by helplessness.  His father's illness with cancer of the mouth, and his approaching death leveled the wall between them.          It may seem that Thomas's rebellious attitude toward his strict father, which had been left unexpressed, breaks out in his poem, "Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night," because of the speaker being a son or daughter whose father is dying. Emery states, "This darkest day is an image of a life as the father's blindness is an image of his failure to see the need in his son for outgoing love. . . . Father and son meet in this poem as perhaps they never did in life" (55).  However, even though they do meet in a way they never had before, it is not directed against his father, "but by transfer against death" (54).  "Silence for Thomas was death, sound was life" (Moynihan 245).  He shows his fear of death, first of all, in the title, which is repeated several times in the poem.  "Do Not Go Gentle. . ." meaning do not go silently and calmly, "Into That Good Night," or into death (1,6,12,18).  Another example of Thomas's fear towards death is when he also repeatedly states, "Rage, rage against the dying of the light" (3,9,15,19).  When he repeats the word "rage" he gives the word an even stronger meaning, as if to seem desperate.  He also uses "Good Night" as a metaphor for death.          In the first stanza, the speaker says, "Old age should burn and rave at close of day" (2).  What he is trying to say to his father is that with age one should be stronger, and should be willing to fight death.  In the next four stanzas Thomas uses wise men, good men, wild men, and grave men as examples of how he wants his father to die.  Wise men know that death must come because all through their lives they spoke of only the truth.  They do not die patiently because their word "forked no lighting," or lit no fires (5).  Good men hoped that they could have helped more in the end.  Wild men provoke their deaths with their rebellious actions and dangerous lives, and grieve in their dying days.  Grave men are too blind and serious in their lives, and in their deathbeds, as well.  Here the speaker uses an oxymoron and a paradox when he says, "who see with blinding sight," or they look with cloudy sight, and do not see the fun they are missing out on (13). In the last stanza, the speaker cries out to his father to "curse, bless" him, another oxymoron, to show any sign of life (17).  "It is in this sense that we should understand 'Rage, rage against the dying of the light,' where Thomas is still exhorting his father to reject, to criticize, to express the value of life by raging against death. Whether his tears constitute a curse or a blessing on his son, they would be better than this gentle and terrible silence" (Moynihan 90).          Dylan Thomas once said this could be described as "two sides of an unresolved argument" (187).  His argument in this poem was between whether life was worth living or not worth living.  Early in the poem it is very clear he sides in favor of life.  This poem is Thomas's plea to his father to die as wise men, good men, wild men, grave men, and as the father himself had lived--struggling, and "raging against the dying of the light" (19).

Works Cited Emery, Clark Mixon. The World of Dylan Thomas. Coral Gables, Fla.: University          Press, 1962. Moynihan, William T. The Craft and Art of Dylan Thomas. Ithaca, New York:          Cornell University Press, 1966. Simpson, Louis Aston Marantz. A Revolution in Taste: Studies of Dylan          Thomas, Allen Ginsberg, Silvia Plath, and Robert Lowell. New York:          Macmillian, 1978. Thomas, Dylan. "Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night." Handout. UTPA          [Edinburg, TX.] 20 Apr. 2001.