I have an affinity with rage on this blog! Medusa gets lots of attention and so does Miss Havisham and even David Almond’s The Savage. Perhaps it is the most Janus faced of all of our emotions: rage the disorderly dancing partner of despair.
Perhaps rage is about trying to externalise despair in a controlling, non submissive way. I don’t know. But this a a great poem. It reminds me of my father and of my own fears about acquiescence and non attachment. I think it is one of my most personal readings on this blog and although I am sure Dylan Thomas was often unbearable personally , his Welsh fury moves me deeply. We can all sympathise with his sense of helplessness as his father dwindles away his hold on life.
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.
Sometimes only rage will do.
My father was Welsh and his favourite listening was Richard Burton reading Under Milk Wood on an LP that has long been lost. My father was a wanderer in so many ways and on Sunday I found a letter I had written to him nearly 28 years ago when he was again living somewhere else, trying to build once again another new life, having no knowledge whatsoever, that within two years he would be dead. Reading the poem this morning to my son as he ate his cereal for school, I was suddenly aware of my father and aware of his own profound sorrow about his tragically early death; his wrongful attachments to careless people whose sincerity proved unenduring and illusory and whom he loved because he didn’t dare to love himself at all.
In the poem the sense of visceral despair at the father’s impending mortality is spat out in this villanelle, where the poet tries to order his father’s life force to resist his illness and fight back for life.How ironic the ‘good night’ might be when what it represents is desertion, the abject loneliness of being the one left behind. The final stanza declares the desolate desperation of the poet for any communication from his father, be it savage or sane enough to save him from the dying light.
Dylan Thomas was a poet who got so many things wrong in his life and perhaps even in his Art. Yet here he is absolutely right.
Sometimes only rage will do.
This is an ‘oh wow moment’!!! Thomas’s poem, totally encapsulates grief and love and hate!! Been there, got the T shirt!!! Thomas powerfully evokes the ‘de profundis’ moment when one is confronted with the death of ‘the’ father’, not yet killed by malingering, malignant hate, or burning love, but slowly, lingerlingly, softly, gently – no raging here. Just the tick, tick of the clock, the rising and falling of the chest, in/out, in…./…..out, the Cheyne Stokes’ start/stop, tick tock, stop/start. STOP! But the Thomas Boy, with cut glass accent still rages on. He doesn’t want the battle to end – who has won, the father or the son???
This ‘elegy’ does not concur or collude with the dark, shrouded, sickle carrying figure of death, but evokes a poignant, indeed visceral image, gut-wrenching, heart-aching, ‘can’t fight this bastard’, guilt with relief ‘strangly mixed’, finally ending in the utter rage of hopelessness. To paraphrase from the brilliant film ‘Meet Joe Black’ – you can’t avoid Death and Taxes, or indeed as the sub-plot suggests – ‘parents’, particularly ‘daddy’ – the only sure thing in life!!!! Whatever, the relationship or even non-relationship – it’s in the DNA. Thomas ultimately knew this. Rage, rage … against the ‘dying of the light’ and the omnipresent ‘Taxman’. It is a fact – you can’t fight it!! Love, or even hate is a form of tax, but death lives on!! The Big Daddy of them all!
I’ll drink to that.
To anyone who is interested, make the pilgrimage to Laugharne, to Thomas’s retreat. A place of bliss and peace and lots and lots of alcohol ……. and Caitlin and love and hate and passion and sex ….. and Under Milk Wood and the the dark, gladed track of silver moon, silver seals frolic still in the esturary and dark trees echo and whisper with dark, welsh voices, calling, calling, like Hardy and Coleridge’s (Both Welshmen at heart) women wailing, juniper sirens in smoke filled pubs, sodden babies crying and laughing on silky sand, waiting for their fathers, always, on and on forever and always!! Tom Jones, Burton, Hopkins …. oracles of Cymru, God’s Own Country, verdant valleys from slag heaps now sing of paradise lost and gained – Land of my Father. (To Harold Meredith)
Forgive me for my self-indulgence!!!!! It was late and I had a couple of glasses of wine. x