THE INSPIRATION BEHIND THE ART:
I love the poems of Dylan Thomas! Like most people it is this poem that lights me up the most and I’ve decided to share why I love it so much.
“Do Not Go Gentle” offers a compelling case that we should embrace the torture of anger and regret while we are dying. The piece starts by listing different types of people (written as different types of “men”, but obviously its for everyone). He lists wise men, good men, wild men, and grave men and describes their respective torments. The sad and frustrating regrets that they each might find when they reflect on their life. The piece ends with Dylan Thomas watching his own father dying in turmoil. He sees that, though his father loves him, Dylan Thomas is himself the frustrating regret that his father is tortured by.
Curse, bless, me now with your fierce tears, I pray.
This poem resonates with so many people because it is one of very few art masterpieces in our culture that sanctions “negative” emotions at death. It is a beautiful and undeniably wise piece that gives us and our dying loved ones, permission to be angry. We receive constant instructions to pass peacefully and gently with love and forgiveness. Ending your life with anger and turmoil in your heart seems vulgar even though we all recognize that a mind’s emotional experience at death is extremely textured to say the least. The idea of embracing rage at death is downright taboo.
The other wonderful thing about this poem for me is that it offers us insight on both a universal, macro scale and an individual one. From the pulled back vantage point of the first part we can all find ourselves and members of our families. At the end, it shifts and we are all invited into a deeply intimate room where a specific man is dying and his son is there with him.
As his father dies, Dylan Thomas is beginning to grieve, recognizing his father’s disappointment and love for him and his acceptance of his father’s rage is perhaps the most profound apology and forgiveness a son can offer.
Love.
Listen to the whole poem, read with the beautiful vibrato voice of Dylan Thomas himself, here:
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