[img]2873|right|Dylan Thomas||no_popup[/img][Editor’s Note: Linda Ferrara (lindaferrara@aol.com) is one of our favorite readers. After reading to her granddaughter the other evening, she forwarded this abbreviated but appreciated missive: “For you Mensa kids. I quoted this as Emily Dickenson’s work to Eileen tonight. Memory not so good!!”]
Ms. Ferrara referred to the poem below:
“Nothing like reading good poetry to ground you.”
‘Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night’
By Dylan Thomas
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 that 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.
[Editor’s Note II: Dylan Thomas was a Welsh poet who died tragically young – just past his 39th birthday — but left a powerful legacy of work. This poem, written to Mr. Thomas’s dying father, has a strict structure, but an unconventional message. Mr. Thomas encourages his father to rebel and struggle against death, what he calls the “dying of the light.” Although written for his father,
Mr. Thomas himself ironically died in 1953, the year after his father.]
