"Do not go gentle into that good night" is a poem in the form of a villanelle by Welsh poet Dylan Thomas (1914–1953), and is one of his best-known works.
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.
Then, in the subsequent stanzas, he proceeds to list all manner of men, using terms such as "wise", "good", "wild", and "grave" as descriptors, who, in their own respective ways, embody the refrains of the poem.
In the final stanza, the speaker implores his father, whom he observes upon a "sad height", begging him to "Curse, bless, me now with your fierce tears", and reiterates the refrains once more.
[10] In his 2014 "Writers of Wales" biography of Thomas, Davies disagrees, instead believing that the imagery is more allusive in nature, and that it "clearly evokes both King Lear on the heath and Gloucester thinking he is at Dover Cliff.
[12] Other composers who set the poem to music include Vincent Persichetti (1976),[13] Elliot del Borgo (1979),[14] John Cale (1989, on Words for the Dying),[15] and Janet Owen Thomas (1999, in the final movement of her Under the Skin).