Do Not Go Gently
As I’ve said before, I struggle with poetry. I am, I think, an impatient reader. I value clarity of thought and precision of expression. Poetry, though, doesn’t walk in straight lines. It makes you think. There is an elegance as well as precision in poetry, but it is hard won.
But precisely because poetry takes the circuitous route, because it makes you slow down – sometimes to understand what you’ve just read, or to re-read it a time or two, or to keep moving forward even if you can’t pin down what “it really means” – for just these reasons poetry makes it possible to give voice to some thoughts and emotions that resist easy or simple or precise expression.
Poetry, T.S. Eliot once said, is rendering blood into ink. Not just thoughts, but blood, real, honest-to-goodness struggle and hope, ecstasy and disappointment. Poetry lends itself, that is, to bringing from the depths of our being our deepest emotions so that even though we may not fully comprehend them, yet we can acknowledge and sometimes even embrace them.
This past week I have found myself often stumbling in those depths of emotions in reaction to the shootings in Aurora, Colorado. Experiencing grief for those who were killed and their loved ones; despair at the rampant violence permitted, even cultivated, in our culture; anger over the meaningless of it all. And helplessness, perhaps worst of all, after one more outburst of senseless gun violence.
Which is what brought to mind, I think, Dylan Thomas’ most famous poem. Written as his father was dying, it is easily read as something of both elegy to honor his father and plea that his father hold on, fighting to the end. Or one might read it as the poet’s words to himself, confronted in the death of his father with his own mortality. But one might also read it more broadly as encouragement to all of us – men and women, young and old, wise and good, wild and grave – to resist unwelcome and untimely death.
For all these reasons and more (must a poem have just one meaning?), I find myself recalling Thomas’ words and wanting all us rage against not just death but the inclination to death and violence that permeates our land and the hopeless acceptance of gun violence as part of the American way of life.
This has been a dark and difficult week, yet we are called as people of faith to care for those who are wounded, to kindle hope in those who are near despair, and to rage against the dying of the light in whatever shape or from we encounter it. For one day this night shall pass, death will die, and we all – all – will arise in the light of a new day.
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.
Dylan Thomas, 1914-1953
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