Let’s Talk! – Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night

“What’s wrong with gentle?” was my first thought upon reading today’s conversation prompt that popped up in my friend Tyrean Martinson’s book “A Pocket-Sized Jumble of 500 + Writing Prompts.” What context does this line come from? Though well-read, other than “Under Milkwood” and “A Child’s Christmas in Wales”, I can’t remember anything that I have read by Welsh symbolist author Dylan Thomas. To be honest, his style of writing failed to touch me other than seeing that he was a master of words. And it was as if he knew it and played on it. Don’t get me wrong – I had my fun with symbolism, and I fooled around with it in those days when twenty-some-year-olds think they can reinvent the arts by creating something even more symbolical.

I watched a German documentary about Dylan Thomas to understand where he came from.

A kid who was raised on poetry, who dropped out of school to become a journalist and, not much later, a renowned poet. A man who wasted his marriage fee twice on drinks with his intended – well, third time’s a charm. Who, if his wife of 18 years and mother of his three children is to be believed, never stayed at home a single night. You don’t want to know all the other details I learned from that fractured life of a person disliked for being the person he was and adored for what his work and his performance of it.

Reading the poem that starts with the lines “Do not go gentle into that good night” raises my hackles. Maybe that was Dylan Thomas’ intention. What’s wrong with gentle? His answer is, “Rage, rage.” The poem describes that in the end all our efforts will be cut short and their impact made questionable by death. We might not have found what we have been looking for. So, we ought to rage against the given. But – really?!

The poem is from a son to his dying father. From somebody who is still trying to make sense of everything whereas the older one is already in a remoter sphere. Maybe raging against something inevitable makes little sense to the father; it doesn’t mean that he doesn’t make an effort at getting out of life what he can get. Behaving like a Rumpelstiltskin won’t change that we all have to die one day, though. It certainly doesn’t make anybody look more credible or dignified. Nor does it enhance our legacy.

We don’t know about the father’s thoughts – it’s speculation. I see an angry, young man rage against the futility of life and make a spectacle of himself. Maybe that’s why the father’s so remote at a “sad height”? Maybe, the father once was like the son?

Rage versus gentleness. I know which I prefer and why. The lasting gentleness of water can shape a landscape and is welcomed more than a raging torrent leaving everything behind in shambles. The great philosophers in human history all speak of gentleness, of the love for the humble, for the small detail. Some of them didn’t “go gentle into that good night” – their ends were violent, but not because they CHOSE to become a spectacle. Because their gentleness put those who killed them into the wrong and showed that their raging was despicable. What stays in mind is that gentleness is always worthier and carries over the millennia.

You may have totally different associations with today’s prompt. Your turn for pondering now!