The poem that woke me
 

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We'd be remiss if this wasn't among these…


Do not go gentle into that good night
Dylan Thomas - 1914-1953

Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Though wise men at their end know dark is right,
Because their words had forked no lightning they
Do not go gentle into that good night.

Good men, the last wave by, crying how bright
Their frail deeds might have danced in a green bay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Wild men who caught and sang the sun in flight,
And learn, too late, they grieved it on its way,
Do not go gentle into that good night.

Grave men, near death, who see with blinding sight
Blind eyes could blaze like meteors and be gay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

And you, my father, there on the sad height,
Curse, bless, me now with your fierce tears, I pray.
Do not go gentle into that good night.
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
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If writers fail, it is because their words have "forked no lightning."

Good men, the last wave by, crying how bright
Their frail deeds might have danced in a green bay,

That bit always makes me think of this.

He might have been a Packer fan.

To which his father says, "Dylan, make up your mind. Should I curse you, or should I bless you? Why do you insist on confusing a dying man?"

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My universe is cozy : )
Some say he was thinking only of himself.
Strange bedfellows this.
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Thomas wrote one of those thousand-year poems, a poem so good that no one will write a better one for at least a thousand years. I had the same experience with Yeats. "These Are The Clouds" revealed to me what a great poem can be.

It starts out majestically:

These are the clouds about the fallen sun,
The majesty that shuts his burning eye

And then gets even better:

The weak lay hand on what the strong have done
Till that be tumbled that was lifted high
And discord follow upon unison
And all things at one common level lie

This was written in 1916, a good year for Yeats and for Irish independence.

Tim, I think in the less-than-a-thousand years since that poem was written there have been superior poems, though perhaps none as famous. Dylan Thomas himself has written better poems, in my opinion. I think "Fern Hill" is hugely superior, for example.

Roger, I know that I won't convince you otherwise, so I won't try. "Fern Hill" is a lovely poem, as is "In My Craft or Sullen Art." The latter, especially, stayed with me for many years, though maybe not a thousand.

On second thought, I will say this. "Do Not Go Gentle" is a much tighter poem than "Fern Hill," which has many lines, phrases, and whole stanzas that could be altered in some way, or even deleted. This looseness, in my opinion a defect, is also characteristic of Thomas, who often went for sound over sense. So many of his poems are lushly written, a quality embellished by his brogue, but are deficient in other ways that matter.

I don't see anything in Fern Hill that I would delete. And I think DNGG is burdened by being too message-y, with the message failing to resonate with those who might want a dying loved one to go as gentle as possible. Its main selling point is the reader's admiration of the craft of his sullen art as he perfectly fulfills the French form and exploits it to the fullest. It's a great poem, mind you. I don't deny it. But Fern Hill can stand beside Wordsworth's immortality ode (as I know because the two poems were paired together by my excellent high school teacher who introduced us to Fern Hill). Anyway, I won't convince you, but I've convinced myself just now be rereading Fern Hill. It's simply dazzlingly beautiful. I mean, you have to love,

So it must have been after the birth of the simple light
In the first, spinning place, the spellbound horses walking warm
.... Out of the whinnying green stable
........ On to the fields of praise.,

don't you?

Rogerbob, I strongly disagree with this critique:

And I think DNGG is burdened by being too message-y, with the message failing to resonate with those who might want a dying loved one to go as gentle as possible.

First off, I don't think it's "message-y" at all. It's a personal address from the N to his father. The general appeals of the first five stanzas must be read in the light of the personal turn in the last. I just don't see that the N's concern is with the dying struggles, or not, of people in general. It is about one such struggle and one such struggle only.

Second, if any readers fail to resonate with the poem because it does not capture their relation to the death of a loved one, I have no hesitation in placing the blame squarely on these hypothetical readers. "I can only resonate with poetry that expresses feelings exactly as I, myself, have felt them" is an attitude that makes for bad reading of poetry. Surely one of poetry's greatest strengths is to help its readers encounter attitudes not their own, expressed in their most persuasive form.

Roger, my favorite line has always been "Though I sang in my chains like the sea," which aptly describes what formalists do, I believe. But Thomas only loosely adheres to a formal scheme in the poem. Yes, every stanza has nine lines, and the corresponding line of each stanza has roughly--very roughly--the same metrical pattern. However, the poem's overall effect is that, for all its loveliness, it verges on disorder. Thomas should have tightened up its chains. And he could have deleted the penultimate stanza without damaging the poem

Aaron, of course I can "resonate" with poems that express views that are different from my own. For example, I am often moved by deeply Christian poems by the likes of Herbert and Milton, though I have never for a moment been even slightly tempted to the Christian faith. But my claim that the Thomas poem is "message-y" does not mean that I deplore any poem with a message, any more than my dislike of sentimental verse means that I don't like poems with sentiment. It's a judgment call, of course, though clearly you and I reach different judgments.

Don't get me wrong. I do think it's a fine poem. But the idea that it's a once in a thousand year poem strikes me as way over the top. There are probably dozens of poems written in the last millenium of so that I think are better. If you don't think Fern Hill is one of them, then what about Keats's odes or Wordsworth's immortality ode? What about any number of poems by Blake? What about some of Shakespeare's sonnets? And do you really not think that Emily Dickinson wrote anything as good as Thomas's villanelle?

As any good anthology will show, there are hundreds of thousand-year poems, including some from all of those you mention. There may be an even thousand. I would say that "Rage, Rage" makes the cut but that "Fern Hill" doesn't.

I thought that calling it "a poem so good that no one will write a better one for at least a thousand years" you were excluding the ones I mentioned. But if there are a thousand such poems, then I certainly have no trouble finding a slot for Fern Hill. To each his own, but I would have thought its stature as great poetry was something we'd all take for granted along with the other poems I mentioned.

Roger, sorry that my critique imputed to you views you don't hold. I should've stuck to my first point: I just think it's wrong, as a matter of literary analysis, to think the poem is message-y. The rest was overkill, and uncharitable.

I wasn't meaning to defend that it's a "thousand-year poem", since I don't understand what that means (and I understand it less now than before Tim's clarifications).