Why rage against a good night?

Reading Dylan Thomas

Why rage against a good night?

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.

Of these famous lines, which start Dylan Thomas’ poem about his dying father, the economist Robin Hanson asked on Twitter, “If we should rage against its coming, why is the night ‘good’?”

Robin is asking a very sensible question and it’s worth elaborating on a little. I’ll do this with a close reading of those three lines.

Do not go gentle into that good night

Firstly, we must realise that this line is showing us that the father is going gently into that good night. Thomas doesn’t want him to. At the end he says,

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.

He wants something from his dying father, some resistance. What we have to remember is that this poem expresses Thomas’ grief: he is practically remonstrating with his dying father. Death might be a good night, a peaceful sleep, he says, but how can you leave me here without so much as a murmur?

So, one important answer to Robin’s question is that the “we” who rages against death coming is not the same person as the “we” death is coming to collect. Dylan in injuncting his father—and the final lines make it seem like his father did not in fact rage against anything.

For those of us still living, seeing someone slip gently away can indeed by horrifying. Will we go gently too? Surely not… surely we will rage against the dying of the light… Surely?

The phrase “good night” refers to death. It is idiomatic, which means it is a “special usage” in a particular language, dialect, etc. What is distinctive about “good night” is that we say it before sleep. And sleep is a metaphor for death. People have long called sleep a little death. Death is routinely referred to as a sleep in poetry (our little lives are rounded with a sleep).

So, Thomas is using good night in a very particular way — rather than using it as a salutation (“good night, sleep well”) he makes it a noun-phrase for death. This is not quite ordinary usage… it becomes, therefore, idiomatic to the poem. He takes one common phrase and uses it in place of another. This is a way of making original use of language but with common phrases. Admirable work.

Now, before we look at “rage” we need to look at “gentle”. The ideal death is a gentle one. We all want to die peacefully, painlessly, quietly. We want to slip away, like Arthur on the river. Think of Tennyson: “And may there be no sadness of farewell,/ When I embark.” Admiring Victorian biographies always contrived a gentle death-bed scene. Respectability means gentility. The respectable death is a gentle one. We are told to accept death, by custom and by religion. So the ideal death is one where we slip gently out into the good night of eternity. (Jonathan Edwards points out that “gentle” is a childish word (as indeed is “good night”) and as Edwards says “in the face of death we are, all of us, children.”)

Thomas’ poem is so famous because he immediately inverts the expectation of a gentle death. Grief often is an angry denial, and that is the tone of the whole poem, from the opening line. He speaks against his father’s death, but also against a whole tradition of dying.

Old age should burn and rave at close of day

Now, the second line: “Old age should burn and rave at close of day.” I believe this expresses the sense that it would be better to go mad than to accept death gently. Who burns and raves other than one consumed uncontrollably by their own wild emotions? Madness was often described as a fever of the brain—and we say that we go raving mad.

Again, this is Thomas’ mad grief: his father lacks it. Note the three internal rhymes in this line—age, rave, day—which follow the three “g” alliterations in the first line: Thomas’ impassioned grief is strongly expressed. The stumbling repetitive raving of a man who cannot bear to see his father dying gently is turned into the poetic arts of internal rhyme and alliteration. Note also the word “should”. His father is not raging, but Thomas thinks he should: otherwise, the fear of inevitable death is too strong for him to bear.

The idea of sleep as a little death is also linked to orgasm, fainting, and the death of a small part of yourself. (Several jokes occur in Shakespeare about the “little death”. Tess has a petite mort. etc) So one thing Thomas is saying here that old age gets no intensity before the little death: no orgasm, nothing so exciting it induces a fainting fit. This is a little death without the preceding intensity—so the lack of raging is partly what alerts us to the fact that this is not the little death at all, but the big one. Thomas wants his father to rave because that would be a sign of life.

So, the first line tells us the father is going gently to death and the second line has told us that he should burn and rave, thereby implying he isn’t. Anyone who has seen a person dying will know this sensation.

Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

It should be clear by now that this line is delivered by the poet/son somewhat feverishly, as if behind glass. It is not good telling an old dying man to rage against the good night. But to the living left behind it’s too awful to contemplate not raging. For atheistic Thomas, it isn’t possible to write consolatory poetry. He cannot write, as John Donne did, “One short sleepe past, wee wake eternally, And death shall be no more”—no, one short sleep past and it is Thomas’ father who shall be no more. No wonder he felt such rage.

Reading the whole poem

One thing you will notice is that I answered Robin’s question by referring to the final lines. This is an essential part of reading a poem. Each line is a new step in a thought processes: this poem is, like many lyrics, embodied consciousness, a chain of thoughts. It is designed to make us constantly adjust our perception, our awareness. On first reading, we feel quite strongly the shock of realising that this is not a generic poem—he is talking to his dying father. This is part of the way the poem teaches us to read it: we see those opening lines in different terms once we have read the closing ones.

In general, I do not love Thomas’ poetry, but this line is hugely affecting: “Curse, bless, me now with your fierce tears, I pray.” The idiomatic I pray is especially striking. This has the desperation of Donne talking to God but with the modern terror of death as oblivion. Thomas is praying to his father. He knows this is hopeless, and so the refrain at the end takes on a darker chill, as we know now this is the hopeless, semi-mad grief of a secular son watching his father gently pass away.

Do not go gentle into that good night.
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Please, he says helplessly, please rage against it—don’t just leave me here.