The Story Behind Dylan Thomas’s “Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night” and the Poet’s Own Stirring Reading of His Masterpiece

The morning before he died in the final year of his seventies, he drafted a poem containing these lines:

You can’t tell when strange things with meaning

will happen. I’m [still] here writing it down

just the way it was. “You don’t have to

prove anything,” my mother said. “Just be ready

for what God sends.” I listened and put my hand

out in the sun again.

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These days he relied on the increasingly fragile assumption that what he said was right, and what was right was what he said. The journalist said he had done a story on the survivors, had met and filmed them. Their suffering, he had said, was terrible and life-long. It is not that you know nothing about war, young man, Dorrigo Evans had said. It is

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I believe Icarus was not failing as he fell,

but just coming to the end of his triumph.