Reading this poem always fills me with a mix of energy and sadness - that is also what makes me return to it. A poem about death, but not everyone who loves it sees only death - there is something for the living too. I have experienced it different over the decades. Sometimes it has been about death and the passing of someone I did not want to let go.
At other times, it has been about finding renewed energy to overcome difficult times, not give up and allow a part of me to die in the process. At some point it became J's favorite poem and like other fans she returned to it time and again. As I read the poem today, my thoughts are definitely on old age and dying, not being able to hear the voices of loved ones ever again once they breathe their last, not understanding the depth of my own feelings until it is too late to do so:
It’s no accident, surely, that Dylan Thomas’s “Do not go gentle into that good night” is a poem which is read at two out of every three funerals. We respond to the sense in that poem, as in so many others, that the verse engine is so turbocharged and the fuel of such high octane that there’s a distinct likelihood of the equivalent of vertical liftoff.
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