[Mark Allinson]

It is a wonderful poem, but I object to it based on its "message," since I can't for the life of me see why a son would wish on his father an angry, ungentle death.

Roger, here is how I see it. Thomas’s father approached his own death in the same passive, resigned way that he lived. To Thomas, such an attitude suggested a lack of engagement with life. Had such passionate involvement been present in his father, it would not have allowed him to die in such a “gentle” manner. Knowledge of what he would lose, and what he had not yet accomplished, should provoke him to “rage against the dying of the light.” Even “wise men”, if they had not accomplished their aims in life, don’t go gently into death. And even “good men”, whose lives might have seemed more impressive in a flattering social environment, realise what they are about to lose, and rage against its loss.

I recall Thomas saying in an interview that his father was the only person in the world he couldn’t show this poem. His father’s lack of resistance to his own demise seemed to suggest an indifference to life which was more distressing to Thomas than anger. That’s my understanding.

Tim, yes, I agree there is a windy element here, but perhaps it is the divine afflatus, the breath of holy inspiration which often inflates rhetoric like this. And while it will always annoy some of us, it will also guarantee that the poem will be popular 500 years from now, since we always turn to high-rhetoricals like this (like “Death, be not proud”) when in extremis - their very windiness buoying us up.

Janet, yes, I agree, it is a younger man's poem, expressing his own rage at his father's passivity.


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Mark Allinson