Do NOT Go Gentle Into Life

"Do not go gentle into that good night" by Dylan Thomas in a nutshell, is a poem that speaks of the inevitability of death, the acceptance of it, and how despite of its imminent approach each day, we should face it like brave warriors and to not give up until the very end of our last breath but for me it goes beyond that.

Dylan Thomas, being the bad boy and rock star poet he was, he neither believed in God, nor in the afterlife, which lead me to realize that he is essentially an existentialist poet who believed in defining his own meaning in life and making his own choices.

When I first read the poem, the first thing I thought right after finishing it was about a quote from Woody Allen's movie "Magic in the Moonlight": 

Based on that quote, what is the point on living at all? If you think of it that way, humans are born to die later on and we grow knowing this with certainty.  But what this poem aims to express, for me at least is a philosophy of life that is applicable to every situation.  Take for example the stanza 2:

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.

I interpret this stanza as:  every smart person knows that death is unavoidable, but this is no reason for them to willingly accept it, yet this so called cleaver man should fight against death until the last moment. You may wonder why he should, and the answer it is that despite of the fact of him being clever man, he haven’t really made a mark in or on the world to remembered for.

Such stanza led me again to think about existentiality and the quote of the book. So, again what is the point on being alive if you know you will die no matter what you do? Well as for what I read (the poem), the importance of being alive is to make it count. Meaning that if you have the chance of doing something important which may transcend your own existence, do it no matter the difficulties- because death will come at the end and you may regret not having done something useful with your live, something worth to risk your life for, something to be remembered for when death arrive. And even there the clever man will not be conform with what he has done during his life since we as humans will always want to give more, thus  still no man should go gentle into the good night because all men deserve the opportunity to share what they have learn though life.

Another stanza which resulted in a great advice is stanza number 5:

"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"

Since it refers to death as, as I already said, something imminent nevertheless we can choose whether we die kicking and screaming, peacefully and quiet, nervous and scare. In other words is our decision how we are going to take our last breath, how we will face death.

This stanza however refer to death, can also be applied to a wide variety of situations where something inevitable is going to happen.  Take for example life; if you are alive, you can’t avoid living, what you can do is choose the way you are going to live. As Sartre states: "At first [Man] is nothing. Only afterward will he be something, and he himself will have made what he will be."

To wrap up, I’ll go back to Stanley’s quote in Woddy Allen’s movie, “you are born you commit no crime and then you are sentenced to death” I translate this as if we are condemned to die since the very first day we are born, then why bother at all. This is essentially truth, yet I must say that Dylan Thomas’s poem taught me something of which I am not always aware. That is that you are the owner of your decisions, not only to the topic he refers to (the death) but in every aspect of life you are the one who get to choose your own path to go through despite the absurd condition of humankind branded by  the unavoidable death. 

Existentialism information taken from: http://www.iep.utm.edu/existent/