The Story Behind Dylan Thomas’ “Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night” and the Poet’s Own Stirring Reading of His Masterpiece
POETRY FORMAT, 24 Jun 2024
Maria Popova | The Marginalian – TRANSCEND Media Service
“Poetry can break open locked chambers of possibility, restore numbed zones to feeling, recharge desire,” Adrienne Rich wrote in contemplating what poetry does. “Insofar as poetry has a social function it is to awaken sleepers by other means than shock,” Denise Levertov asserted in her piercing statement on poetics. Few poems furnish such a wakeful breaking open of possibility more powerfully than “Do not go gentle into that good night” — a rapturous ode to the unassailable tenacity of the human spirit by the Welsh poet Dylan Thomas (October 27, 1914–November 9, 1953).
Written in 1947, Thomas’s masterpiece was published for the first time in the Italian literary journal Botteghe Oscure in 1951 and soon included in his 1952 poetry collection In Country Sleep, And Other Poems. In the fall of the following year, Thomas — a self-described “roistering, drunken and doomed poet” — drank himself into a coma while on a reading and lecture tour in North America organized by the US poet and literary critic John Brinnin, who would later become his biographer of sorts. That spring, Brinnin had famously asked his assistant, Liz Reitell — who had had a three-week romance with Thomas — to lock the poet into a room in order to meet a deadline for the completion of his radio drama turned stage play Under Milk Wood.
Dylan Thomas, early 1940s
In early November of 1953, as New York suffered a burst of air pollution that exacerbated his chronic chest illness, Thomas succumbed to a round of particularly heavy drinking. When he fell ill, Reitell and her doctor attempted to manage his symptoms, but he deteriorated rapidly. At midnight on November 5, an ambulance took the comatose Thomas to St. Vincent’s Hospital in New York. His wife, Caitlin Macnamara, flew from England and spun into a drunken rage upon arriving at the hospital where the poet lay dying. After threatening to kill Brinnin, she was put into a straitjacket and committed to a private psychiatric rehab facility.
When Thomas died at noon on November 9, it fell on New Directions founder James Laughlin to identify the poet’s body at the morgue. Just a few weeks later, New Directions published The Collected Poems of Dylan Thomas (public library), containing the work Thomas himself had considered most representative of his voice as a poet and, now, of his legacy — a legacy that has continued to influence generations of writers, artists, and creative mavericks: Bob Dylan changed his last name from Zimmerman in an homage to the poet, The Beatles drew his likeness onto the cover of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, and Christopher Nolan made “Do not go gentle into that good night” a narrative centerpiece of his film Interstellar.
Upon receiving news of Thomas’s death, the poet Elizabeth Bishop wrote in an astonished letter to a friend:
It must be true, but I still can’t believe it — even if I felt during the brief time I knew him that he was headed that way… Thomas’s poetry is so narrow — just a straight conduit between birth & death, I suppose—with not much space for living along the way.
In another letter to her friend Marianne Moore, Bishop further crystallized Thomas’s singular genius:
I have been very saddened, as I suppose so many people have, by Dylan Thomas’s death… He had an amazing gift for a kind of naked communication that makes a lot of poetry look like translation.
The Pulitzer-winning Irish poet and New Yorker poetry editor Paul Muldoon writes in the 2010 edition of The Collected Poems of Dylan Thomas:
Dylan Thomas is that rare thing, a poet who has it in him to allow us, particularly those of us who are coming to poetry for the first time, to believe that poetry might not only be vital in itself but also of some value to us in our day-to-day lives. It’s no accident, surely, that Dylan Thomas’s “Do not go gentle into that good night” is a poem which is read at two out of every three funerals. We respond to the sense in that poem, as in so many others, that the verse engine is so turbocharged and the fuel of such high octane that there’s a distinct likelihood of the equivalent of vertical liftoff. Dylan Thomas’s poems allow us to believe that we may be transported, and that belief is itself transporting.
“Do not go gentle into that good night” remains, indeed, Thomas’s best known and most beloved poem, as well as his most redemptive — both in its universal message and in the particular circumstances of how it came to be in the context of Thomas’s life.
By the mid-1940s, having just survived World War II, Thomas, his wife, and their newborn daughter were living in barely survivable penury. In the hope of securing a steady income, Thomas agreed to write and record a series of broadcasts for the BBC. His sonorous voice enchanted the radio public. Between 1945 and 1948, he was commissioned to make more than one hundred such broadcasts, ranging from poetry readings to literary discussions and cultural critiques — work that precipitated a surge of opportunities for Thomas and adrenalized his career as a poet.
At the height of his radio celebrity, Thomas began working on “Do not go gentle into that good night.” Perhaps because his broadcasting experience had attuned his inner ear to his outer ear and instilled in him an even keener sense of the rhythmic sonority of the spoken word, he wrote a poem tenfold more powerful when channeled through the human voice than when read in the contemplative silence of the mind’s eye.
In this rare recording, Thomas himself brings his masterpiece to life:
For more beloved writers reading their own work, see Mary Oliver reading from Blue Horses, Adrienne Rich reading “What Kind of Times Are These,” J.R.R. Tolkien singing “Sam’s Rhyme of the Troll,” Frank O’Hara reading his “Metaphysical Poem,” Susan Sontag reading her short story “Debriefing,” Elizabeth Alexander reading “Praise Song for the Day,”, Dorothy Parker reading “Inscription for the Ceiling of a Bedroom,” and Chinua Achebe reading his little-known poetry.
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My name is Maria Popova — a reader, a wonderer, and a lover of reality who makes sense of the world and herself through the essential inner dialogue that is the act of writing. The Marginalian (which bore the unbearable name Brain Pickings for its first 15 years) is my one-woman labor of love, exploring what it means to live a decent, inspired, substantive life of purpose and gladness. Founded in 2006 as a weekly email to seven friends, eventually brought online and now included in the Library of Congress permanent web archive, it is a record of my own becoming as a person — intellectually, creatively, spiritually, poetically — drawn from my extended marginalia on the search for meaning across literature, science, art, philosophy, and the various other tendrils of human thought and feeling. A private inquiry irradiated by the ultimate question, the great quickening of wonderment that binds us all: What is all this? (More…)
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Tags: Dylan Thomas, Poetry
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4 Responses to “The Story Behind Dylan Thomas’ “Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night” and the Poet’s Own Stirring Reading of His Masterpiece”
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Among the many excellent TMS articles re politics, economics, wars, human grandeur and stupidity….I have felt especially fortunate to read Maria Popova’s “Brain Pickings” (I didn’t mind the name!) and now “Marginalia” (quite nice!).
Maria’s enlightening ventures into the minds and bloodstreams of famous and not-so-famous authors make our world more comprehensible, more sensible, exciting and humane.
Maria’s excursion here into the incomparable world of Dylan Thomas brought me back some 50 years, when a young girlfriend and I sat rapt in wonder while the LP record spun and Dylan recited “Do Not Go Gentle into that Good Night” and “A Child’s Christmas in Wales.”
Thank you, Maria, for your good work & sharing your humanity….
Sorry… make that “Marginalian” (which has a nice ring in it!)
Time does not exist! The deception is revealed! I open the “Schoolboy’s Handbook” of the Lada publishing house, issued in 2004 (compiled by A.M. Popov).. and on page No. 65 I see the names of physical quantities and the names of the units of measurement of these quantities!? Length is understandable, weight and kilogram are also understandable, but in words: time and second I see two mistakes (in two words, two mistakes!?) – firstly, the physical value of “time” does not exist in nature (we do not see it until we have found it) and those cunning people who want to make money on it must try hard to prove the opposite to us, there are many communities on the planet (huge groups of strange people) who have been studying mythical time for decades… they study in words… come up with more questions than answers, but all of them have not found a single confirmation of his existence!? (but they managed to connect non-existent time with absolute emptiness… and even with matter itself, which has its own personal laws and flies freely to the emptiness of dead space!?). The second mistake (and the greatest meanness!) the fact that a second is not a unit of measurement for some time!?.. it only measures the duration of the processes!!! This is our purely earthly measure!.. the derivative (divided) of the rotation (rotation) of the Earth that we invented!? With the help of Einstein (and another three–year-old helped him, Newton) we have been deceiving our children since childhood… drugging them since childhood!? In addition to the fact that they will also read Hockey’s insinuations (invented so irresponsibly and senselessly that they do not even look like fiction and a fairy tale!?), they will have to learn string theory, the theory of multiple universes, the theory of gravity (which supposedly exists in the boundless void of space), the theory of the Big Bang, during which was the emptiness of space born, all matter!?… and the fictional time itself!? (Einstein’s theory of relativity tells us about all this and much more!?.. in which there is not a single word of truth, not a single component of Truth!.. and all the followers of Einstein have been explaining the word “relativity” for a long time, using various casuistic words (academician Landau in his book presents us with two drawings on which a shepherd and a cow are drawn (on one – a cow is bigger than a shepherd, and on the other a shepherd is bigger than a cow), where they justify the word “relativity” (the word is a parasite After all, the reader will still have to explain that here the photographer stands closer to the shepherd, and here – closer to the cow!?.. and no relativity!?..). Next, Mr. Landau tells us about the case of the doors breaking in the train cars, where all passengers observe the doors opening at different times: what do they think!?.. in words, relativity also seems, in words, simultaneous explosions (who needs them, simultaneous?) they are building a theory of relativity, which allowed this lie (the ravings of crazy Einstein) to grow with all sorts of nonsense for 100 years… all the way to the Higgs Boson, the “Theory of Everything”, the birth of the Universe, time dilation (it does not exist!), the curvature of space… matter – antimatter, electron – antielectron, bread – antichleb, light – anti-light (they elevated emptiness to the rank of the category “space”!?… Someone may object to me: how could millions of scientists conspire against Humanity, organize such a large gang, if there was no reasonable grain?.. and I will answer them: cheaters do not need to organize, they will not have to be convinced for a long time, because at the beginning of the twentieth century scientists faced a terrible danger: there is only a huge (infinite, it is easy to prove) volume of emptiness in the world!.. and the matter that is always falling somewhere, into some well of emptiness!?.. There are no books to write or dissertations based on these initial data.. and it is very long and very painful for science to advance!?.. in this case, the cunning Hockey would have starved to death long ago, because any of his lies would immediately become obvious…Einstein saved all these shocking, immoral “scientists”: now they can defend the same dissertation, beat the same idea in millions of identical dissertations written simultaneously in all countries!? Hundreds of trillions of dollars are flying not to the wind (it could still be forgiven … with millions of starving people), but into the pockets of an organized, scientific mafia … strengthening it, strengthening all destructive processes on the planet!?.. there is nothing stupider, more primitive and meaner in the world (even lawyers, where instead of 5 laws there are 100, politicians, bankers, policemen, generals, billionaires do not cause such harm as these pseudo-scientists!?)!?
This is an unshakable axiom in my hands… the presumption of innocence: I see (have) the emptiness of space and see matter… there is nothing else around!? And now – let them prove (show): “here are the worm holes (in the void!?)… eternal or temporary… created because of something… out of something… for something!?.. and here’s another universe!.. We see it.. and we know what it is made of and according to what principles!?.. and here, and like this!.. there is a curvature of space!.. and with it, time!.. at the same time!?.. at one point!?.. and time: made of these sticks.. and counts and adjusts itself!?.. Prove all this to me, scientists of the planet!.. Nobel laureates, members of the Nobel Committee!?.. in the meantime, we suspect you of a century-old group deception (your books and your laws, your articles have all the evidence of this deliberate deception!?)!!! And if all of you do not admit your mistakes now, do not outline a way out, then after a while you will all answer to your peoples… and the court will be fair and just.
Why do we need time? Such a physical magnitude, such a phenomenon, such a force, such an object – not only does not exist, does not exist, we do not even need it (that is, not only was it not born during the Big Bang, but the Big Bang itself did not happen 13.7 billion years ago, in the void of space!?)!? There was no Big Bang not only for this reason, because today… in the void of space we see objects that already existed 12 billion years ago!? 12 billion years ago, photos of these galaxies (photons) flew to us!? But in order for them (these galaxies) there they had to fly (in 1.7 billion years, which remained from the age of the universe – 13.7) the distance (which the photon flew in 12 billion years) – in tens and hundreds of trillions of years!?? (after all, a photon flies in 10 thousand. times faster than matter (e.g. Earth)… and if he flew for 12 billion years, then you need to add four more zeros to them!?.. it turns out that all the scientists of the planet have been deliberately deceiving us for 100 years: with this Big Bang … with this birth of time!?.. And this distant galaxy (if it is alive) is flying in a completely different direction and from a completely different black hole!?… How could these two threesomes (I wouldn’t be surprised if one of them stole ideas from alchemists, and the other worked… and stole from the patent office) have been able to deceive humanity for so many years!.. world science is so cunning and hypocritical, so closed, that soon they will be able to do whatever they want with us!? We need to create a single center that will be responsible for the state of affairs on the planet and the leakage of any ideas and malicious weapons!? Time is an empty word, relativity is an empty word, space is an empty word, the simultaneity of events is utter stupidity, the flight of matter at the speed of a photon is the nonsense of a seven–year–old child, the flight of a rocket into the future is a deception, a mockery… the rocket will simply fly far from the Earth, to where there is no future, but there is only emptiness!?
Time does not exist! All the events that came true, came true (what we call “the past tense”) remained in books, newspapers and in the memory of living people!? Are these events!?.. and the “past time”, which millions of scientists talk about (where they were going to fly for many years) also does not exist… there is nowhere for us to fly… those events were forgotten, gave impetus to new events, those that are happening now. The future tense, where the sick Hawking and the unfortunate Einstein are calling people, also does not exist, it can be called: “plans for the future life”… they will be implemented at the next revolutions of the Earth!?.. not all of them will come true and even your (invented by scammers, deceivers) karmas, destinies, religions and their numerous rituals will not help you … your good wishes for the new year on December 31!?.. all these wishes flew into the void for those people (who died in one second!?) in the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, for those Jewish and Russian children who were tortured by the fascists of Germany, the fascists in Japan!? People, be vigilant! Don’t let yourself be fooled! Don’t take anything for granted!
G. Samolov–Karpachev removed all the main questions (blinders), the debris of antiquity in science and opened a free path, the road to the immortality of mankind, and with it Man!
Dear citizens of Japan! If you can give me 10 publications in the media, then I will gladly trust (only Japan!) thousands of inventions and future dissertations on these topics! And with them – the fate of our Civilization!
And as soon as humanity learns from your media that every Earthling, a person on Earth, already has a chance to Live Forever, all his mercantile Desires and aspirations immediately disappear, and he (and each of us!) immediately begins to assemble his team, which will work not for Fear, not for a dollar, not for the king, but for a great idea that even religions did not dream of, even Swift and Pushkin and they are, they are obvious!!! I see all the roads, and today they all lead to hell (to troubles, catastrophes, covids, infections, wars), but our commanders do not see this!? Neither the kings nor the fathers of religions considered it IMPORTANT, necessary to object to the flawed Newton, Einstein, Hawking, Minkowski, Lemaitre and recheck 100 times, check their new postulates and proofs, which in 100, 200 years, by the forces of scoundrels and scammers, will surely turn into an impassable swamp, into rubble on the path of civilization!? Today, not a single student or student will dare to directly ask the president of his country or the forced rector: Is the universe eternal or one–time? This happens only because, only because the answers and refutations to these two questions (are IN the COMPETENCE OF the AUTHORITIES!?) is there only me (and millions of dissertations – only them)!? But I don’t want the power of a king, a dictator, but I want to work in a team of 8 billion like-minded people, friends, geniuses, creators, happy and equal people! The efficiency (efficiency coefficient) of this Eternal civilization will instantly soar 8 billion times, and since this civilization no longer has enemies (and never will!), then there will be no harm from them on this beautiful planet, and the development of science and technology will be endless!
Today is the same!? Today, even in order to express my completely non-criminal, not dangerous idea, I have to look for support in a foreign country (no, it’s not a stranger to me at all, because tomorrow, we can all become brothers and sisters on the planet, and every meter of Land will belong to each of us and expect from each of us attention and love!)!? For ten thousand years, all the religions of my patient and friendly planet promised PEACE to the peoples, and after death, eternal life for everyone according to a well–known pattern (but even here I found out everything, proved it and am waiting for criticism and confirmation)!?
Those fantastic finances that civilization possesses today, and spends recklessly, recklessly, in vain, swaggering and bragging, would be enough for the decent maintenance of Hundreds, thousands of such civilizations!? Without being afraid, for some reason, of cosmic and terrestrial cataclysms, Civilization DOES NOT UNDERSTAND that today it is urgently necessary to GUESS, CALCULATE all threats to our native planet, native civilization, which does not want the works, the wonderful legacy of Aristotle, Shakespeare, Beethoven, Voltaire, Pushkin, Leonardo to disappear forever.!? As there have never been any!? And today, the “bicycle”, like the atomic bomb, is being invented, 200 laboratories are being created in 200 countries, when only 1 laboratory is needed, on the planet, in a civilization of 200, 50, 20 people!
Attention! Only this motto can gently and constructively rebuild the consciousness (mentality) of every person and INSPIRE all concerned earthlings to Work together and Celebrate: “The first and main value for me is my beloved, ideal, happy, friendly civilization and every METER of my planet!”. And Gregory has enough slogans and ideas for everything, for everyone! The Keeper of the Magic Code of Bulat Okudzhava.
P.S. Grigory Samolov-Karpachev can be trusted: already today he examined the human body and found 600 unknown muscles in it that sleep forever (die early, interfere, but do not help the heart!?). Grigory proposes to ensure thereby: an increase in human life to 150 years, promises a safe process and the total interest of all children in sports (where there will be no ignorant, unruly coaches), to their bodies, to pure science from now on, and importantly – to the invaluable support of the elderly!
Gregory has already destroyed empty dangerous words: singularity, “Big Bang Theory”, “young universe”, empty, fake word “time”, all the garbage of centuries (from all philosophers at once!), forever destroyed 8 childish, naive postulates about the time of the Greatest, Terrible, loud, dangerous Newton, all films with time, all formulas, millions of fake dissertations about space-time, as well as the future CHIP in the brain of every child and academic, as a total, ubiquitous, deadly Lie, as well as a terrible Atmosphere in which everyone is forced to wallow, suffer and drown, even great dictators, even famous humanists!? I’m waiting for invitations. I am ready to give lectures and answer any questions.