Dylan Thomas: Do Not Go Gentle...

Understanding a poem like Dylan Thomas's "Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night" is a tremendous achievement for any learner of English, and a considerable challenge for the EFL teacher. The topic is hard and the syntax is disjointed by the metric of the poem, a villanelle, but the pathos of the poem can be felt, if not understood, when you first watch these Welsh actors reciting the poem for BBC Cymru Wales:

It is fascinating to hear the sounds and the words of a foreign language and to understand almost nothing, just like when you first started learning English a long time ago. Reading poetry or song lyrics has a power, it can take you back to that initial stage when English had the magic of unintelligibility.

Yet, we want to know, we want to understand. This lesson shows how I tackled the challenge for a B2+ class, but, this class is problably more suitable for C2 students. The plan starts with some simple warm-up questions to get the attention of the students. The listening task is a fill-in-the gap exercise, to give them a purpose to listen to the poem twice (good poems, like good songs, need to be heard several times to feel them in your heart), there are several questions for discussion, a glossary, to ease students painstaking task of looking up words in a dictionary and a Powerpoint presentation to help the teacher introduce the main points of the analysis of the poem.

The class materials include this link to Shmoop's Study Guide of the poem for teachers: basically, the topic of poem is "Dylan's lament for his father's loss of health and strength, and his encouragement to cling to life", (can you think of anything for appropriate in times of a global pandemic?). The poet thinks that "old men shouldn't die peacefully, but they should 'burn and rave' struggling with a fiercy intensity". Then the poem uses different metaphors to express how "wise men", "good men" and "wild men" have tried to fight "the inevitability of death with all their might", but they have failed. "Grave men, near death" resist and fight death with the energy of meteors blazing in their blind eyes. Finally, Dylan Thomas addresses his dying father and asks him "to cry passionately, which will be both a blessing and a curse". If you want to know more about the symbols, and how the metric of the villanelle forces the poet to twist English syntax to fit the rhyme scheme (AbA' abA abA' abA abA' abAA') (A and A' are the refrains, A: Do not go gentle into that good night; A': Rage, rage against the dying of the light), you can click here.

If you want to read some more about the life and works of Dylan Thomas, the poet who made Robert Allen Zimmerman change his name to Bob Dylan, you can start by reading this Wikipedia article. Or check the references under the text of the poem.

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