Wise men, good men, wild men, grave men: each is summoned in turn and each, at the threshold of death, discovers a final, furious reason to burn. Dylan Thomas composed this villanelle in 1951 as his father, once fierce and commanding, was going blind and fading toward death. The rigid form of the villanelle, with its repeating refrains and its locked rhyme scheme, becomes a kind of cage in which grief thrashes and will not be still. Every line tightens the same two demands: rage, rage against the dying of the light, and do not go gentle. Thomas asks for the impossible. He asks that the dying refuse to die. The poem endures because it voices what no mourner can bear to leave unsaid.