Villanelle

I can still hear the sadness in my Mother’s voice on those rare occasions, when she speaks of the loss of her mother as a young girl. So many years ago, and I can still see the tears well up in her eyes as if the loss were yesterday. The first time I read the poem, “Do not go gentle into that good night” my heart hurt and I realized the sadness my mother must feel. The poem was written in 1951 by Dylan Thomas, a famous Welsh poet, about the death of his father who had been an English Literature Professor at a local Welsh school. His father began reciting Shakespeare to Thomas before he could even read and these readings and recitations inspired a deep love within Thomas for poetry (Dylan, Bio). “Do not go gentle into that good night” is

The villanelle is the poetic form that Dylan Thomas uses in “Do not go gentle into that good night.” The date and origin of the villanelle is disputed amongst scholars as some believe the current form was introduced in France in the sixteenth century while others don’t acknowledge the contemporary form of its existence until the late nineteenth century (Villanelle). Villanelle is a complex and highly structured poetic form that consists of nineteen lines made up of five tercets followed by a quatrain. The form has an intricate rhyme scheme and two lines that alternate at the end of each stanza. The alternating repeated lines Thomas uses are, “Rage, rage against the dying of the light” and “Do not go gentle into that good night.” The rhyme scheme is ABA ABA ABA ABA ABA ABAA. Although not required in a villanelle, Thomas uses a metrical pattern known as an iambic pentameter which is ten syllables per line. This gives the poem a patterned rhythm and beat. This beat supports the theme of the poem which is the struggle between life and death, so in reading the poem, to me the rhythmic pattern repeats as “life-death, life- death, life death, life death, almost as a heartbeat.” While other poets, such as Robert Frost, Sylvia Plath, and Elizabeth Bishop have penned villanelles, none have touched my heart in the same way or to the same level as Dylan

During the time frame in which Thomas penned “Do not go gentle into that good night,” he was struggling with alcoholism, financial issues and infidelities within his marriage. Simultaneously, his father was sick and ailing, succumbing to death in 1952 (Dylan, wiki). The depth of despair Thomas felt is voiced within the poem. Using bold and contrasting themes between life and death, Thomas adopted symbolic words and phrases to represent each. For life, Thomas uses forms of light such as bright, sun, burn, rave, and blaze. For death, Thomas uses metaphors of night and dark, and then symbolic phrases, “close of day,” “dying of the light,” and “grieved it on its way.” Thomas is just as bold in his use of alliteration. In the title of the poem which is also used as a refrain, Thomas uses the hard g sounds at the beginning of “go” and “good,” the n sounds at the beginning of “not” and “night” and in the middle of “gentle” and “into” another n sound. Brilliantly Thomas continues within the poem, using the b sounds in four words and bl sounds in three of these four words, “blinding,” “blind,” “blaze,” and “be,” and the r sound in “rave” and “rage.” Just as captivatingly powerful is Thomas’ use of imagery. He captures this vivid imagery in phrases like “words had forked no lightning” referring to a lightning bolt, “the last wave by” referring to a rolling ocean wave on the sea, and “the sun in