Defiance-the-dubious-virtue

First of all, I invite you to read this weird-ass poem by Dylan Thomas, 1914 - 1953. You probably first saw it from the movie interstellar.

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.

For my part, I saw the movie, got curious, read the poem, wondered what the heck it was all about, and forgot about it.

And then so8res wrote about Defiance-the-dubious-virtue, and it all came back.

This is what is is all about: (I’ll quote the original article, because it is worded much better than anything I could express)

Defiance is not about coming to terms with the world. It’s about looking looking at the world and having the same mental reflexes as the defiant child. It’s about the reflexive impulse to say “screw this” and choose self-reliance over hopelessness in the face of problems that are crushingly large. It’s about a deep-seated inability to go gently into that good night. It’s about being able to look at the terrible social equilibria we’re all trapped in and get pissed off — not because any individual is evil, but because almost nobody is evil and everything is broken anyway.

Above all, it’s about seeing that the wold is broken, and feeling something akin to “fuck these mortal constraints, I’m fixing things.”

To better understand the poem, I recommend this analysis, but because the site is full of ads, I’ll just inline it all here:

Get out the microscope, because we’re going through this poem line-by-line.

Lines 1-3

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.

The speaker addresses an unknown listener, telling him not to “go gentle into that good night.”

At first this is a puzzling metaphor but, by the end of line 3, we realize that the speaker is using night as a metaphor for death: the span of one day could represent a man’s lifetime, which makes the sunset his approaching demise.

“That good night” is renamed at the end of line 2 as the “close of day,” and at the end of line 3 as “the dying of the light.” It’s probably not an accident that the metaphor for death keeps getting repeated at the end of the lines, either. Or that the two rhyming words that begin the poem are “night” and “day.”

So what does the speaker want to tell us about death? Well, he thinks that old men shouldn’t die peacefully or just slip easily away from this life. Instead, they should “burn and rave,” struggling with a fiery intensity.

The word “rave” in line 2 connects with the repeated “rage” at the beginning of line 3, uniting anger, power, madness, and frustration in a whirlwind of emotion. Oh, yeah, it’s going to be one of those poems. Get ready to feel.

Lines Lines 4-6

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.

These lines are potentially quite confusing, so let’s start by untangling the syntax of Thomas’s sentence here: even though smart people know death is inevitable (line 4), they don’t just accept it and let themselves fade away (line 6), because they may not have achieved everything they were capable of yet (line 5).

The metaphor of night as death continues here, with death figured as the “dark.” The speaker admits that sensible, smart people realize death – traveling into “the dark” – is inevitable and appropriate. After all, we’re all going to die, and it’s a totally natural process.

But even though clever people know they’re going to die, they don’t simply accept it. They don’t take the news lying down.

Why not? The speaker tells us that it’s because “their words had forked no lightning” (line 5). This image is puzzling and open to several interpretations.

Here’s ours: the “words” represent the actions, the speech, or maybe the artistic creation of intelligent people. You know, the way this poem consists of Dylan Thomas’s own “words.”

These words don’t fork lightning, which means they don’t split and divert the massive electrical shock of the lightning bolt, which draws it toward themselves like a lightning rod instead. Even though the “wise men” have put everything they can into their “words,” those words weren’t attractive enough to make the lightning split.

Basically, they haven’t really made much of a mark on the world.

The bright electric current of the lightning bolt adds a new twist to the light/dark and day/night metaphors, suggesting that really living life is more like getting zapped by an electric shock than like feeling the gentle radiation of the sun.

This stanza also begins to conflate – or collapse together – people in general, such as the person the speaker is addressing with poets and artists like the speaker himself.

As the poem continues, we’ll see more and more connections between great men and great artists. These connections imply that artistic expression is a more concentrated version of life in a broader sense. You know, the way a can of lemonade concentrate tastes way more lemon-y than the lemonade itself once you add water.

Lines 7-9

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.

Once again, the best way to understand how all these poetic images work together is to untangle Thomas’s sentences, which are all twisted up so that they fit the meter and form of the villanelle.

The basic parts of this sentence are the subject, “Good men” (line 7), and the verb, “Rage” (line9). In the speaker’s opinion, true goodness consists of fighting the inevitability of death with all your might: “Good men […] Rage, rage against the dying of the light.”

Next, Thomas adds an image of the ocean waves; the most recent generation of good men, the “last wave by” (line 7), are about to crash against the shore, or die.

As they approach death, these men shout out how great their actions could’ve been if they’d been allowed to live longer.

Or, to use the metaphor in the poem, as their wave crashes against the rocks, the men shout how beautifully that wave could have danced in the bay if it could’ve stayed out at sea instead of rolling onto the beach.

So this generation is like a wave, death is like the breaking of the wave on the shore, the sea is like life, and the dancing waters in the ocean are like beautiful actions.

The bay is “green” because the sea is really brimming with life – plants, seaweed, algae, you name it.

In this image, being out at sea is like life and coming back to the barren shore is death –the opposite of the metaphor you might expect, in which drifting out to sea would be like death.

Notice that Thomas describes the good men’s potential future actions – the things they won’t be able to do because they have to die – as “frail deeds.” It’s not clear whether the men or the actions are weakened by age; perhaps both.

Lines 10-12

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.

The speaker describes another kind of men – those who don’t allow themselves to fade quietly away into death, “Wild men” (line 10).

What sort of men are we talking about? The kind who captured the world around them in their imagination and celebrated it – “who caught and sang the sun in flight” (line 11) – only to discover that the world they celebrated was slowly dissolving around them as comrades age and die.

Here the sun represents the beauty that exists in the mortal world, and its “flight” across the sky represents the lifespan of people living in this world.

“Flight” also suggests that it moves rapidly – our lives are just the blink of an eye.

So just when you think you’re partying to celebrate birth and life, symbolized by the sunrise, you find out that you’re actually mourning death, symbolized by the sunset.

Lines 13-15

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.

The speaker describes the way that “Grave men” fight their impending death.

Notice the pun on “grave,” which could either mean that the men are very serious, or that they are dying.

These serious dying guys realize that, even though they are weak and losing their faculty of sight, they can still use what strength they have to rage against death.

So, even though their eyes are going blind, these men can “see,” metaphorically speaking, with an overwhelming certainty or “blinding sight,” that they still have a lot of power over the way they die, even if not the timing.

Instead of getting snuffed like candles, they can “blaze like meteors” (line 14). They’re planning to go out with a bang.

Lines 16-19

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.

In the last lines of the poem, the speaker turns to addressing his father. His father is on the verge of death, which the speaker describes as a “sad height.”

We think this is probably an allusion to looking down into the Biblical valley of death; the metaphorical mountain where the father stands is the edge of the mortal world.

The speaker begs his father to cry passionately, which will be both a blessing and a curse. After all, the father’s death is heartbreaking. But if he battles against the odds, it might also be heroic.

The speaker ends with the two lines that are repeated throughout the poem, asking or instructing his father not to submit to death – instead, he should rant and rave and fight it every step of the way.

Once you see that this poem is defiance-the-dubious-virtue applied to death, it shines quite a bit of light onto defiance-the-dubious-virtue—the-principle.

As so8res seems to suggest, it may be beneficial to apply this principle to other areas in life.