In 'Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night', how does the poet present the speaker's feelings about his father?

Dylan Thomas’s poem is concerned with the rush of emotions his speaker encounters upon the realisation of his father’s imminent death. Indeed, it is from this liminal space – between life and death – that the poet sources many of the speaker’s feelings. The final stanza, for example, is indicative of the range of emotions that the speaker encounters. The adjectives ‘sad’, ‘fierce’ and ‘gentle’ are offered as part of a stanza that reflects the speaker’s realisation that he does not have long left with his father. Yet the juxtaposition of ‘sad’ and ‘fierce’ with ‘gentle’ presents a certain level of ambivalence; it is as though Thomas is suggesting that death may not always be negative. However, the ambivalence inherent in this stanza contrasts the poem’s central message. The repeated refrains of ‘Do not go gentle into that good night’ and ‘Rage, rage against the dying of the light’ contain an imperative tone that is metaphorical of the speaker’s torment: it is as if the speaker is begging his father to live, ordering him to evade death. The persistent rhyme of ‘night’ and ‘light’ reinforces the sharp contrast between death and life but is also metaphorical of how the speaker’s emotions may switch between positive and negative depending upon his father’s fate.

Contextually, it is important to recall that Thomas witnessed his own father’s death. Given that Thomas had a strained relationship with most of his family, it is likely that the death of his own father prompted a reassessment of his own life and the many different paths that he could have chosen. As such, the poem features references to a range of different lives: ‘wise men’, ‘Good men’, ‘Wild men’ and ‘Grave men’. This range offers the reader a spectrum of life itself and Thomas’s decision to place this spectrum in a poem overwhelmingly concerned with death connotes an undertone of hopefulness. However, these are other men’s lives and, as the poet turns those ‘Good men’, we witness the speaker’s envy conveyed metaphorically through ‘a green bay’. The speaker is almost jealous of the lives his father could have had and that he is unlikely to ever experience. That Thomas chooses to realise all this in the moments before death – rather than once his father has actually died – makes it all the more painful for the speaker, an emotion shared by the reader. The speaker uses up his final precious moments with his father on considering other people’s lives.