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Dylan Thomas's "Do not go gentle into that good night" has been noted to bear the influence of and even echo W. B. Yeats, especially "Lapis Luzuli," and, secondarily via this poem, Shakespeare's King Lear. One scholar notes its "Yeatsian overtones" (Fraser 51); another judges Thomas's villanelle to have "much of the concentrated fury of expression which the poetry of the older Yeats contained, but . . . more tenderness and sympathy" (Stanford 117), and goes on to say, citing "Lapis Lazuli," that "Yeats described the poet as one who knows that `Hamlet and Lear are gay"' ( 118) . William York Tindall cites not only "Lapis Lazuli" but also Yeats's "The Choice" as sources (204) . Another scholar seems to skip over Yeats entirely (though his own phrasing echoes line 1 of "Lapis Lazuli"), seeing the "Grave men/blind" tercet (which contains the injunction to "be gay") as "perhaps invok[ing] the Miltonic" (Tindall also mentions Milton 205) and the effect of the phrase "be gay" as "rather hysterical sentimentality" (Holbrook, Dissociation 53); of the earlier "Wise men/lightning" verse, however, he says "The images are merely there, histrionically, to bring in the phrase `forked no lightning' to give a Lear-like grandeur to the dirge" (52).
I would like to propose that "Do not go gentle into that good night" bears a much stronger and more direct connection to Shakespeare's play than is suggested by references to Yeats or to "Lear-like grandeur." I would like to propose that the attitudes towards death-or, more precisely, the attitudes towards how one lives in the face of impending death-that Thomas explores in this poem-the implied attitude his speaker attributes to his direct audience, and the one he urges be adopted in its placeare similarly explored in King Lear and dramatized in the characters of Gloucester and Lear. I also propose that the voice we hear in "Do not go gentle" may not be a directly lyric speaker but an obliquely drawn persona, that of Gloucester's son Edgar. Further, when read in the shadow cast by King Lear, the tone of Thomas's poem grows dark indeed.
"Do not go gentle into that good night" is addressed to Thomas's father, David John, known as D. J. According to biographer Paul Ferris, D.J....