This poem, as everyone knows 
is written to Thomas' dying father
It is probably his most famous poem 
and it is certainly the most famous example
in English poetry of a form of poem 
which we know as the 'villanelle'.
Among the several reasons 
why this poem is so popular,
I think, one of them is that it 
exhibits something which really helps
in our appreciation 
of great art.
And that is, that it is 
pretty good the first time we see it.
But also pretty good the tenth, twentieth, 
thirtieth time we see it.
In almost any piece of art we like, 
this seems to happen.
The art can have an immediate effect 
and it still has something
that appeals to us 
after repeated viewing.
Thomas' work often does this, 
and it does it because
Thomas never really seems as interested in 
what he's saying
as he is in the way 
that he's saying it.
Thomas is very interested in, 
and attuned to, the sound of words.
This does not mean that we cannot do 
what we do in these Mycroft Lectures,
which is the simplifying of the 
actual sentences which the poet writes,
so that you can understand them 
and appreciate them in simpler English.
What the ambiguity that Thomas often uses 
allows us to do,
is give multiple meanings 
to some of the lines Thomas wrote.
I'm quite a fan of this, actually. 
I quite like it when
there is enough ambiguity 
within a poet's work
for me to be able to have 
two or three different readings
of certain lines 
that they've written.
It's almost as if I just get more for my money 
by them having done this.
I don't think the poem is reduced by me 
not knowing exactly what they have put across.
I think the poem is enhanced by there being 
different possibilities for what they have put across.
While I was a kid doing GCSEs, 
and A Levels,
there was a question which 
they used to ask us.
And it used to infuriate me 
that they'd ask us,
'what was the poet's intention 
in writing this?'
And the only honest answer 
you could give to this was,
'I don't know, 
I'm not a mind reader'.
I don't know 
what the poet intended to write.
I know what the poet actually wrote, 
because I can read the poem
and I can interpret it, 
but I don't know if
what the poet 
thought he was writing about
is the same thing as 
what the poet actually wrote.
And it's often the case that 
a poet writes something
and then they say 
what they think it is about,
and then ten years later 
they come back to it, and say,
'what I think it is about, 
is really not what I thought it was about
when I was writing it at all.'
And that's not to say that we should have 
no interest in what the poet's intention was;
particularly when a poet tells us specifically 
what it is they intended in writing a piece.
Or when any artist tells us specifically 
what they intended in writing a piece.
It can be very interesting for us to see how 
that squares with what they've actually written.
Or what they've actually conveyed or portrayed 
in the art that they've actually given us.
That can be really interesting.
And that might be the case here.
So, what Thomas thinks 
is interesting about this poem
won't necessarily be what your eye 
might think is interesting about this poem.
So I'm going to try and say why I think 
this poem has lasted as long as it has,
and why it is interesting to us 
after multiple readings,
at the end of the lecture.
I'll give the lecture by 
reading through the poem.
I'll then explain 
the villanelle form to you,
because once you understand 
the structure of the poetic form,
the villanelle, 
how a villanelle is constructed,
you can understand the 
limitations of writing within that form.
And some of the reasons why 
poets use that form.
Understanding that will help you 
appreciate the repeated lines in the poem.
So I'll give an explanation of 
how a villanelle works.
I'll then do the line-by-line explanation 
of what's going on in the poem,
paying specific attention to 
certain words which can be
interpreted one or two ways.
And at the end, 
I'll give my opinion on
what this poem is saying, 
that is really of interest to us.
So, here we go.
The first read through of Dylan Thomas' '
Do Not Go Gentle Into That 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.
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.
So, the form of the poem, 
the villanelle.
Let's explain that. 
Let's get that out of the way.
So, we know what 
we're dealing with.
The villanelle is a six stanza poem 
of three lines in each of the first five stanzas,
and four lines 
in the final stanza.
Each line is in 
iambic pentameter.
Nothing tricky there, 
you can just take a look at
'Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night' 
and see how that is obviously true.
The tricky thing about the villanelle is that, 
when you write one,
you have to get 
the opening stanza right.
You have to get it right because 
the first line of the poem
will repeat as the final line 
of the second stanza.
It will also repeat as the final line 
of the fourth stanza,
and the first line of the poem will repeat as 
the last but one line of the last stanza.
The final line of the opening stanza will repeat as 
the final line of the third stanza,
the final line of the fifth stanza, 
and the final line of the poem proper.
That's actually much more 
complicated to explain,
than it is to simply observe 
on the poem itself.
So, there's the poem, 
and I just note,
opening line is the same as 
the closing line of the second stanza,
closing line of the fourth stanza, 
and the last but one line of the poem.
The closing line of the first stanza 
is the closing line of the third stanza,
the closing line of the fifth stanza, 
and the closing line of the poem.
What you have to say 
about this type of poetry writing
is it's very, very economical; 
because, if you get your first stanza,
and you've got an opening line and 
a closing line that you really like,
you can use them straight away.
You just edit them in 
as their positions in the rest of the poem.
Once you've written the opening stanza, 
you've already written one-third
of every other stanza in the poem, 
and half of the final stanza.
It's only got two rhymes 
in it as well.
Once you've written the opening stanza, 
you know the words that
all the other lines in the poem 
have to rhyme with.
Do not go gentle into that good night, 
Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
Every other line in the poem 
will rhyme with 'night' and 'day'.
Ok. Those are the limitations 
of the poem,
and yet, if you have got an opening line 
that's really good,
 Do not go gentle into that good night
And a closing line. 
Any line of poetry you write that's really good,
Don't you sometimes think that 
you could use that a bit more often in the poem?
The reader is only going to read it once, 
and it's such a good line that
you want to find a poetic form 
that would enable you to
push that line into the reader's face a bit more, 
to make sure they heard it, appreciate it more.
Rage, rage against the dying of the light. 
would be one of those lines.
Other examples of this particular form, 
Sylvia Plath has a beautiful one called
'Mad Girl's Love Song', 
where the opening stanza is,
I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead; 
I lift my lids and all is born again. 
(I think I made you up inside my head.)
That's the opening stanza for it.
I did 36 of these 
in a book I once published.
They are quite good to do, 
but this is possibly, justifiably,
the most famous one.
Here we go. 
Line-by-line reading of
Dylan Thomas' 
'Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night'.
So, the poem opens with 
Do not go gentle into that good night,
'The good night' 
is of course, death.
Thomas is saying this 
to his dying father.
He is saying, 
'do not go gently into death.'
'Do not resign yourself 
to dying without a fight.'
He says that death is a good night, 
which is rather interesting.
Thomas' father was a 
militant atheist, incidentally.
So, for a militant atheist, who presumably 
does not believe in an afterlife,
the idea that death is a 'good night', 
might not quite square.
To a militant atheist, 
death is nothing, no thing.
But in this, 
Thomas calls death 'the good night'.
Do not go gentle into that good night,
I like 'gentle' 
more than 'gently here'.
'Gentle' to me, gives the implication of 
like a gentleman, genteel.
'Don't go like a gentleman would into death.'
The gentleman would 
accept it, would,
'oh well, very well if that's what expected of me, 
I will move forward and accept this awful situation.
''Goodbye, now. 
The time is for me to leave'.
Thomas is saying, 
'no, don't go like a gentleman.
''Don't go gently, 
don't accept it.
The stereotype of a gentleman is to 
accept and deal with what is put before them.
Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
'Close of day' here is also death. 
It's almost that your business is up.
'Close of day' is usually when like a shop shuts, 
and business is finished.
'Close of day' here is 
your business on this earth is finished.
Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
It should be full of fire and anger 
that their time on earth is finished.
Burning and raving. 
Go out like a lunatic if you have to.
But don't accept it. 
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
'The dying of the light' 
is of course, also death.
'Close of day' is death. 
'The good night' is death.
So, a simple paraphrase of the opening stanza 
is Dylan Thomas telling his father,
'do not accept death without a fight. 
Fight against it.
'Look foolish if you will, and ungentlemanly, 
but do not accept death.'
Thomas then gives us examples of 
the way four types of men meet their death.
These are wise men, good men, 
wild men, and grave men.
So, the second stanza.
Now, note first of course, that the 
last line of the second stanza is
the first line of the poem, 
Do not go gentle into that good night
And we know what that means.
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.
Wise men know that the time 
is right for them to die.
'Dark' of course, means 
death here.
Wise men, when they're near the end of their life, 
they know it's time to die, it's ripe for them to die.
Because their words had forked no lightning they
So what does 
'forked no lightning' mean?
Well lightning is exciting, 
it's dangerous, it's an event.
'To fork lightning' means to 
have caused an event.
So if your words have 'forked lightning', 
you are the sort of person who 
has said interesting things 
or things that made things happen. 
If your words have forked lightning.
But what Thomas is saying here is that 
these men's words,
these wise men's words 
have forked no lightning.
So these are wise men who have 
never said anything that ever changed anything,
or was ever exciting, 
or ever got anything done.
Wise men, when they die, they know 
they've never said anything of any importance.
Because of this, they 
do not go gentle into that good night.
I'd question what Thomas means 
by 'wise men' here.
The type of wise men he's referring to 
are perhaps the stereotype of
the tweedy academic, perhaps?
The type of person who stereotypically 
never says anything that is exciting to anybody.
And on their death bed, 
they realize that they've never said anything
that was any interest to anybody, 
and so they are screaming and kicking
against the dying of the light, 
wishing that they had said the things
that they missed saying 
in their life.
So I think 'wise men' has to be 
thought of ironically here.
Because, I can't see how a wise man 
can really have forked no lightning.
Surely, the people who do fork lightning, 
whose words fork lightning,
the people who do say things that are 
generative and interesting,
those people usually 
are quite clever.
Unless Thomas is playing around 
with clever-wise,
I think the way Thomas is 
presenting them in this poem,
'wise' and 'clever' wouldn't 
mean the same thing.
So.
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.
The third stanza 
is this.
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.
Ok. Good men.
Whether these men are 
what you and I would call 'good',
or what Dylan Thomas is calling 'good' 
at the moment that he writes the poem,
whether these are the same, 
whether we would all have a moral consensus
about what constitutes good here, 
would be the subject of a different discussion,
but this is what 'good men' do.
'The last wave by' for me means, 
the last life-affirming moment of their life finished.
So your life is often thought of in terms of waves, 
you know, the tides come in, the tides go out.
But the big crashing waves that come down, 
these are the life-affirming moments.
So the last wave by, [crash] 
that's gone.
Good men, the last wave by, crying how bright 
Their frail deeds might have danced in a green bay,
So as their life is over, 
these men cry.
Now, crying of course has got two meanings, 
it's got to scream out loud, and to weep.
But both of them 
will do here.
They are unhappy, 
should we say.
They're telling people 
how unhappy they are.
The exciting moments of their life are over, 
and they are telling people how unhappy they are,
about how 
'their frail deeds might have danced in a green bay.'
A frail deed is a deed that is weak; 
is not robust;
is, we must assume, 
uninteresting.
Their frail deeds might have danced in a green bay,
Now, danced, that's always to have 
done something life-affirming, isn't it?
We don't see someone dancing and thinking 
they're having a miserable time.
So whenever somebody writes of somebody dancing, 
we always assume they're doing something live-affirming.
So, at the end of their life, 
the good men cry about
how the weak things that they have done 
would have been life-affirming in a green bay.
Now green is going to symbolize fertility, spring, 
the opportunities for new life.
'The green bay' would have been 
a great place.
And I think this is rather a complicated line, 
but it does, to me, make perfect sense.
He's saying, 
Good men, the last wave by, crying how bright
Their frail deeds might have danced in a green bay,
He's saying, 
'there's a type of person who, at the end of their life,
moans that had they had better opportunities, 
they would have got a lot more done with their life.'
The better opportunities is 
the 'green bay',
'the frail deeds' are the things 
that they didn't do,
but if they had better opportunities, 
their frail deeds would have danced in a green bay.
It's a great line, I think. 
One more time,
Good men, the last wave by, crying how bright 
Their frail deeds might have danced in a green bay
Some people complain on their death bed, 
that they haven't done what they
wanted to do with their life, 
but they would have done,
and their life would have been better 
had they been given greater opportunities.
And these men, 
rage, rage against the dying of the light.
Now here's a slight complication 
in the poem for me.
Is Thomas observing that this type of men 
'rage, rage against the dying of the light'?
Or is he instructing them to 
'rage, rage against the dying of the light'?
In the second stanza, he's observing; 
because it has the word 'they' in the second line.
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.
He's observing them 
not going gently into that good night.
But in this third stanza, 
we don't know whether he is observing the men
raging and raging 
against the dying of the light,
or whether he is instructing them or exhorting them 
to 'rage, rage against the dying of the light'.
And the same will happen 
in the fourth stanza and the fifth stanza.
The fourth stanza, which is,
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.
Note of course that the final line of that stanza 
is the opening line of the poem.
Do not go gentle into that good night.
Wild men.
Now, Thomas himself was renowned 
as somewhat of a wild man.
He was the wild, 
heavy-drinking poet.
He was the wild, 
heavy-drinking poet of his time as well, actually.
Wild men who caught and sang the sun in flight,
To 'catch the sun' means, 
it doesn't mean to get a sun tan.
It means to 
do something great.
You've harnessed a great power 
if you catch the sun.
They caught the sun and 
sang the sun in flight.
So, they've lived a full life, 
is the way I interpret this.
And they've managed to 
explain it to other people.
They've harnessed the power of life, 
and they've managed to explain it to other people.
Wild men. 
And it's no coincidence that
Thomas, being a very wild man himself, 
says that it is the wild men who do this, I think.
The wild men who have 
lived the great life, but
'learnt too late, they grieved it on its way.' 
We grief for something that has died.
And this is a complicated line, 
but I don't think it's beyond our capabilities
to understand 
what it actually means.
And learn, too late, they grieved it on its way. 
What they've grieved on its way is the sun;
the sun which they have managed to 
write poems about by
catching it and singing about 
the sun in flight.
What Thomas is talking about 
in this second line is what
Paul Theroux somewhere called, 
'the impartial cruelty of time passing'.
It's a wonderful line. 
'The impartial cruelty of time passing.'
What he's saying is, 
'even the people who have managed to'-
he here, 
being Dylan Thomas-
In this stanza, what he's saying is, 
'even the artists who have managed to
'live the full life and 
explain to others about the full life;'
'in the very act of living the full life and 
writing about the full life that you've lived,'
'life is passing 
as you are doing it.'
You learnt too late, 
you've grieved life on its way.
You are dying regardless of 
how many moments you managed to
salvage through art, 
of the actual life that you've lived.'
One way of putting it would be, 
each song you sing for the life you've led
will still be a lament 
for the life that's gone.
Even the guys who do this are either 
observed not going gently into the good night,
or are exhorted by Thomas 
not to go gentle into the good night.
The fifth stanza concerns grave men. 
Thomas tells us,
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.
For grave men, 
I think he means serious men.
'Grave' can have two meanings, 
one would be grave-serious,
and the other one would be 
a pun on being near the grave.
It's a horrible pun, 
I know.
Shakespeare uses it in Romeo and Juliet, 
where Mercutio has just been stabbed,
and he says to Romeo, 
'if you ask for me tomorrow,
you will find me a grave man'. 
[Ha..ha..ha..]
It is very out of place here, 
I think, to put a pun at this stage of the poem.
It may well have been intended as one, 
I prefer to see it as serious.
Serious men, 
'near death, who see with blinding sight.'
'Blind eyes could blaze like meteors and be gay.'
To see something with blinding sight, 
there's two possibilities there, I think.
To see something with blinding sight 
could mean that it was blindingly obvious;
or it is something that blinds 
their sight to all other things.
And the serious man sees this 
in whatever way, and he sees that
blind eyes could blaze like meteors and be gay.
Very often, people near death, 
they lose ocular efficiency,
they can't see very well. 
They can still go out with a bang.
They can still go out on fire.
Their blind eyes could blaze like 
meteors blaze, they can still be gay.
'Gay' obviously meaning 
happy and exuberant here.
It's obvious to the blind man that there is 
still something there to live for
at the point when you are dying.
 Rage against the dying of the light. 
Do not go gentle into that good night
This all sounds like encouraging stuff.
Before we get to the final stanza, 
here is a question for you.
I mentioned it earlier.
The final line of each of these stanzas - 
is Dylan Thomas offering it
as an observation on what these men do, 
or a prescription for what these men should do?
In other words, is he saying, 
'I can see these type of men doing this,'
or 'this is what these type of men 
ought to do'?
And then we come to the final stanza.
The final stanza of a villanelle is of four lines, 
and the final two lines of it are as you can see,
the opening line of the poem, 
and the closing line of the poem.
So if you write these, make sure that 
those two lines go together
in the same way that
Do not go gentle into that good night 
Rage against the dying of the light.
go together.
The opening line.
And you, my father, there on the sad height, 
Curse, bless, me now with your fierce tears, I pray.
And you, my father. 
Okay this is him directly addressing his father.
Nothing complicated there.
And you, my father, there on the sad height,
Now, 'the sad height', I don't particularly think 
that's a great line of poetry.
It means, the edge of death, 
the unhappy edge of death.
The height from which you wouldn't 
get any higher, you'd topple into death.
Or perhaps it means the height of sadness, 
the epitome of sadness.
Remember that the word that Thomas uses there 
must rhyme with 'night', 'light', 'bright', etc.
So, he's not got a great deal of choice, 
so he's probably reverse engineered the line,
which is what you tend to do 
when writing villanelles -
you find the line which rhymes, 
and then write the poem to hit that rhyme.
So 'you, my father, 
there on the sad height.'
He also puts the stress- 
the iambic stress lands on
'the' in that line, 
which I try never to do myself.
And you, my father, there on the sad height,
So, at the height of sadness. 
The peak beyond which there is only death.
Curse, bless, me now with your fierce tears, I pray.
Now, 'curse, bless' is 
something of an oxymoron.
An oxymoron is a word like, 'bittersweet', 
or a 'love-hate relationship',
it's when we take two words that are contrasts, 
and we put them together in one word
to make something that-
They don't always mean together. 
A love-hate relationship is
a relationship in which I love you, 
and I hate you,
and I love that I hate you, 
and I hate that I love you -
all that is entwined 
in the love-hate relationship.
You also get words like 'stupid intelligence', 
or 'ferociously complacent'.
Those are oxymorons 
that work very well.
But 'curse bless' 
could be seen as one.
Curse, bless, me now with your fierce tears.
How can tears be fierce?
In fact, are they fierce?
Or is Dylan Thomas wishing 
that they were fierce?
'And you, my father, there on the sad height, 
Curse, bless, me now with your angry, ferocious tears, I pray.'
Now. 'pray', I don't think that really means 
he's praying to a deity.
That means, 'I beg', 
it means 'please'.
'Please curse, bless, me now 
with your fierce tears.'
Basically, he's asking his dad to 
curse him, bless him, just don't die.
He wants his dad to still be alive and 
angry against the pain that he's under.
He wants his dad to be raging and raging 
against the dying of the light.
And he basically begs his father 
at the end of the poem to do that.
I think we basically 
understand it at this point.
People who are old should go out 
screaming and kicking.
They should not subside 
listlessly into death.
It seems great advice to try and 
cling onto life to the end.
But, I mean, when we're teenagers, 
we all like the idea of dying at 90 years old,
with an empty bottle of whiskey in one hand, 
and three exhausted supermodels
in the bed behind us. 
But- and perhaps we still do.
But when my grandfather died at 90 years old, 
I'm pretty sure that wasn't
what was going through his mind.
He had just had enough.
And this is the case of a lot of people 
when they die of old age.
The last thing that they want is 
their sons or grandchildren leaning over them
and screaming,  
'Do not go gentle into that good night.'
'Cling on for every last piece 
of life that you can'.
They just want to peacefully ebb away, 
hopefully with their family
or loved ones around them.
I mean, Dylan Thomas didn't actually 
read this over the bed of his dying father.
He didn't burst in there saying, 
'come on you lazy old sod.'
'Don't just drop off now, 
you've got plenty of life left in you.'
Because, the advice itself, 
if I was to put this kindly, it's not for everyone.
Some could say that it's really insulting 
to the person who is actually doing the dying.
Now, I don't say this, incidentally, 
as an insult to the poem.
In fact, this is not incidental, 
this is why I think the poem is so good.
I don't think this poem is 
interesting to us as sensible advice
that Dylan Thomas is giving his father, 
that we might wish to take on
and emulate or use in our own lives.
This poem is really about 
the desperation and the lengths
that someone will go to 
if that person has a loved one,
an influential loved one who is still alive 
and they want that person to not die.
They will ask that person to 
curse them, bless them, do anything
but don't die.
The poem is selfish, 
it's unrealistic.
One could even argue that some of it 
just doesn't make any sense.
But all of that enhances 
the element of human existence
that Dylan Thomas captures here.
Whether he does it intentionally, 
I don't know.
I don't know if Dylan Thomas' 
intention in this poem
is to give serious advice 
to his dad.
If he was- if that was his intention, 
I wouldn't want to have been his dad
hearing his piece of advice.
You can imagine his father hearing this 
- had he heard it - and saying,
'who are you to tell me that?'
What I think Dylan Thomas captures here, 
intentionally or not,
is our selfish, desperation 
when somebody we love is dying.
'Please, please don't die,' 
is what this poem really says.
I think it's that interpretation that 
has given the poem its lasting appeal.
This is not a poem which is about 
a young man experiencing the death of his father.
This actually is a young man 
experiencing the death of his father.
Let me now give you a few 
brief examples of form in this poem.
What Dylan Thomas achieves by 
breaking the predominant iambic of the poem,
in the way that he does.
When Thomas introduces 
the types of men to us,
three of them, 
the good men, the wild men, and the grave men,
are introduced
right at the start of the line.
And this really interrupts 
the iambic of the line.
Because we would tend not to say, 
'good men, the last wave by, crying how bright',
we would say 
'good men, the last wave by' or whatever.
Now we could say, 
'good men',
accenting that doesn't 
disrupt it too much, I think.
It would draw attention to the fact that 
these are men,
not in a 'these are men, 
therefore they're not women' style of writing.
'These are men, 
therefore, they're not boys.'
The natural way for us to read it is, 
'good men', 'wild men', 'grave men'.
One of the other things I think 
that is important about-
Not important actually, 
but interesting
about the attributes that Thomas 
gives the different types of men,
is I actually think they're 
relatively interchangeable.
If Thomas were to have written, 
'wild men, the last wave by,
'crying how bright their frail deeds 
might have danced in a green bay',
or 'good men who see with blinding sight, 
blind eyes could blaze like meteors and be gay',
would we really notice?
Do we really care what the 
type of men do on their deathbed?
I mean, maybe you think we do. 
Maybe the-
It is only the wild men who would 
catch and sing the sun in flight,
and learn too late, 
they grieved it on its way.
But, I'm not so sure.
Incidentally, I don't think that alters 
my appreciation of the poem in any way.
It's just something I saw fit 
to point out to you.
The interchangeability of the type of men 
and the things which
Thomas sees them doing 
as they die.
One final element of the way 
this poem is written, that I really like.
I love the line, 
'And you my father, there on the sad height'.
Or rather, I love the 
first four words in it.
I love the way, 'and you' seems to 
come across as somewhat of an accusation.
And 'my father' seems to be said 
with real regret.
And you, my father, there on the sad height'.
I think that's a wonderful line. 
Some wonderful emotion put across in that line.
So, now that I've given you 
the simplified version of the poem,
I've presented the poem in simpler words, 
explaining what's going on in it,
let's read it through one more time 
and see if you can appreciate what,
or appreciate more easily what 
Dylan Thomas has given us in this piece.
This is the final read through of Dylan Thomas' 
'Do Not Go Gentle Into That 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.
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.
That was the Mycroft Online Lecture on 
Dylan Thomas' 'Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night'.
I am Dr. Andrew Barker.
Thank you.
Goodbye.
