Do not go gentle into that good night

"Do not go gentle into that good night" is a villanelle by the Welsh poet Dylan Thomas, who lived from 1914 to 1953. It ranks among his most famous works. Thomas composed the poem in 1947 while visiting Florence with his family, though it first appeared in print in the journal Botteghe Oscure in 1951. It was later collected in *In Country Sleep, and Other Poems* (1952) and *Collected Poems, 1934–1952* (1952). The poem entered the public domain outside the United States on 1 January 2024. It has no title other than its opening line, which serves as one of two refrains; the other is "Rage, rage against the dying of the light." Scholars have suggested Thomas wrote it for his dying father, though his father did not die until late 1952.

The villanelle form uses five tercets followed by a quatrain, totaling nineteen lines, with two repeating rhymes and two refrains. The first line of the first stanza recurs as the last line of the second and fourth stanzas, while the third line of the first stanza recurs as the last line of the third and fifth stanzas. In the opening stanza, the speaker urges his father not to accept death passively but to resist it. Subsequent stanzas describe wise, good, wild, and grave men who each embody this resistance. The final stanza directly addresses the father on a "sad height," imploring him to "Curse, bless, me now with your fierce tears."

Critics including Seamus Heaney, Jonathan Westphal, and Walford Davies have analyzed the poem. Heaney called it a threshold poem about death, noting its villanelle structure advances and retreats from resolution, creating a union of opposites that balances natural grief with acceptance of necessity. Westphal argued the "sad height" is a metaphorical plateau of loneliness before death, not a literal bier, since Thomas advised his father while he was still alive. Davies countered that the imagery evokes King Lear on the heath and Gloucester at Dover Cliff.

The poem has been set to music by composers including Igor Stravinsky, Vincent Persichetti, Elliot del Borgo, John Cale, and Janet Owen Thomas. Richard Burmer included a recording of Thomas reading the poem on his album *Treasures of the Saints*. Lines appear in G-Eazy's song "Intro" and Iggy Pop read the full poem on his album *Free*. Ceri Richards created two paintings inspired by it. The poem influenced Mircea Cărtărescu's novel *Solenoid* and