Do Not Go Gentle Into That Dark Night

‘Do not go Gentle into that dark night’

(by Dylan Thomas)

The darkness has been both a place of fear and of fun for me.  Depending upon my mood or simply state of being at the time, night and the darkness that accompanies it can have entirely different meanings.

I first encountered Dylan Thomas in a doctor’s surgery and being bored of waiting was reading a magazine in which was the children’s story about Dylan Thomas’s childhood memories of Christmas.  One line stood out and has stayed with me over many years ‘I made a snowman; my brother knocked it down.  I knocked my brother down. Then we had tea.’   The direct and simple sentences had a real impact on me and remain with me.

Yet of all his writing it was his poem ‘Do not go gentle into that dark night’ that I was most affected by and still am to this day  I am of good age now and have seen and known many make that final journey into darkness  Some struggled and fought, others slipped peacefully into that dark night, but it is a curtain that hides an end or maybe a beginning?

Quite apart from the clear theme of the poem I can read it and take one word; maybe out of the context of the piece, but a word that takes me to a different place.  For example ‘gentle’  I may focus on the word and depending on the place I am in it will take me somewhere else.

Word association is well documented, if not entirely understood.  I stands only just behind the images and memories triggered by smell.  I have no power, no control over where a word takes me and I don’t want that power. The serendipitous journey is always for me a fascinating one. I don’t analyse I just enjoy (or lament, depending…) and Dylan Thomas has taken me on many voyages of discovery and delivered countless images.  Images both dark and beautiful; if indeed the darkness can be so.

One day I will stand at the threshold of ‘that dark night’ and I am reminded by his words to ‘seize the day’ or should I say seize the night.