This is a villanelle that I came across today and was fascinated by it. Villanelles are incredibly difficult to write, but he did this so seemingly effortlessly.
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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 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.

villanelle |ˌviləˈnel|
noun
a nineteen-line poem with two rhymes throughout, consisting of five tercets and a quatrain, with the first and third lines of the opening tercet recurring alternately at the end of the other tercets and with both repeated at the close of the concluding quatrain.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 06/07/2011 01:26AM by AIC.

It is all marked up in my copy of Sound and Sense.

What! You are intelligent too!

goodness queen of denial....how ever did you get to be TBM tehehehehehehehehe!

Ohhhh suki suki now!

I was not BIC ....but almost.

YUCK>>>>>STUPID CULT!

helped me decide, early on, that I wanted to be in AND OF the world, and that living was more important than dying. This poem illustrates how beauty, and life, are the enemy of stultifying dogmas, like Mormonism. I never could understand Mormonism's preoccupation with the dead, until I woke up and realized it was all about money. (Tithing as fees to go to the temple and the fictitious Mormon Celestial Kingdom.)

Mormonism sucks the life out of you, until you are dead before you actually die.

Rage on!

Yes indeed!

That is the only to get compliance cf the Nazi camps...

I love poetry - A love I picked up fairly recently too; at the beginning of this year to be precise. Dylan Thomas is one of the best of the modernist poets, along with W.B Yeats and Auden, who represent Ireland and England respectively, Thomas is representative of Wales, for that particular era.

That poem is often used as an epitaph, read at funerals and often mistaken for an elegy.

I've got to admit though: I've never heard of the form 'villanelle' before today, or if I have, I forgot it.

I love the elegy Funeral Blues by Auden. I love how grossly satirical it is but also how you'd have no idea unless you knew the background. It's so emotional and can easily be mistaken for strong grief and sorrow. It's up for personal interpretation though, of course.

VERY intelligent thread!

It had appeared earlier on a test we were given to study, and I was familiar with it; this time it was the subject of some essentially objective questions regarding "analysis", and the answers are fairly objective for a creative work...

The subject is death, which is that "good night," the body of the poem evokes the emotional angst that faces all at the end of their lives (and their survivors); Thomas creates some marvelous "meditations" with his images and makes them all the more personal when he brings his own father into the narrative...

Brilliant? That's not a subject I can deal with objectively on this one because I know it so well; one test of the "depth" of a poem is whether it achieves a "timeless immortality" (this one has that quality); the form is a structured "wordplay with rhythm" that is remarkable...

Give Galway Kinnell's "Book of Nightmares" a good reading if this subject appeals to you; it's free verse, but the poetic vision and transcendance is equally elevated.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 06/07/2011 05:52AM by SL Cabbie.

Here's a YouTube piece - Dylan Thomas reading this wonderful piece of work himself:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9i12PSzFu5E

I thought you might like it.

Briggy

... we've taken the liberty of employing comedian Rodney Dangerfield:

http://youtu.be/byJCcMJZElg

That's what I'm talkin' 'bout!

Timothy



Edited 3 time(s). Last edit at 06/07/2011 12:54PM by Timothy.

Haha - that about puts it in a nutshell Timothy.

Typically Celtic - don't mess with me even if you think you're a god.

Love it.

Briggy

Only You!

Only you my good man!

I love Dylan Thomas poetry. In fact I am a great poetry enthusiast and it has given me great consolation, insight into the human condition,compassion for others and many other things.

This is something mormonism singularly failed to do. I make this direct comparison because that's how it worked in my life, Mormonism failed me but poetry didn't.

Another one of my favourite poems is 'The Bright Field' by another Welshman, R.S. Thomas.

The Bright Field

I have seen the sun break through
to illuminate a small field
for a while, and gone my way
and forgotten it. But that was the pearl
of great price, the one field that had
treasure in it. I realize now
that I must give all that I have
to possess it. Life is not hurrying

on to a receding future, nor hankering after
an imagined past. It is the turning
aside like Moses to the miracle
of the lit bush, to a brightness
that seemed as transitory as your youth
once, but is the eternity that awaits you

I love this poem, it reminds me to live in the now, something I only really started to do once i shed the shackles of mormonism.

PS despite what my love of this poem might suggest, I am an atheist.