David Castleman
On Dylan Thomas'
DO NOT GO GENTLE INTO THAT GOOD NIGHT
Much reference and much vigorous complaint has been unleashed concerning the use of the word gentle, in Dylan Thomas' masterful and wonderful poem Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night, and because of the reigning confusion, I considered it to be appropriate to toss my penny on the mounting heap. Some too fancifully querulous critics have whined that, like John Keats in his famous sonnet, On First Looking into Chapman's Homer, Mr. Thomas was rather brattishly pretending to a rusticity he did not possess and was deliberately creating an illusion of error so that it might provoke volumes by learned legions of the innocent: he was pretending not to know a thing he knew quite well.
Kindly allow me to seem almost to digress.
For the hunting of birds a dog must be gentled, its naturally uncivil manners must be tamed and its bite must be softened so that the edible flesh of the bird isn't injured while the dog retrieves the shot bird from the marsh or from the field or forest lawn. Once upon a time I was acquainted with a man whose dog had been trained resourcefully and intelligently until the dog could clutch and run with whole fresh eggs in its teeth and would break fewer than one egg in a hundred, carrying them one by one through any commonly encountered terrain.
Then these precious treasures would be placed into its master's hand and the dog would be rewarded generously with biscuits and with fondlings and with sweet words of kindness. With such a skill for carrying such delicacies the dog would never puncture the skin of a bird and would never bruise the flesh nor disturb the feathers unduly.
Although I'd be fairly unwilling to bet my penny on it, I suspect that Mr. Thomas knew as much as he cared to know about dogs and about birds and about hunting birds by the use of dogs, and I suspect that he knew zilch about such things. But Mr. Thomas knew greatly about horses involved in the racing of horses, and he cared about horse racing extremely.
While touring America during his stunningly magniloquent recitals of poetry, and while staying in the homes of his academic colleagues Mr. Thomas would, during the breakfast sessions, ignore the fawning family he imposed upon and ignore the friendly proprieties, and he would ignore the literary chatterings and the news pages of the newspapers, and he would leaf instantly and adoringly to the results nestled among the sports' pages, of local and of world-class horse racing, as he drank his full quart of whole milk and slurped his consciousness-regenerating coffee.
Doubtless this rather adolescent and barbaric behavior disappointed and irritated his dilatorily dining companions who had hoped to receive purest jewels of exquisite poeticisms from his suprahumanly lipped utterances, just as it would have irritated you and me. Hadn't he been expected to pay by entertaining?
In the training of horses a well-behaving horse may be said to be gentled when a bit may be placed into and removed from its mouth without apparent possibility of injury to the fingers and to the hands of the saddler. By the time the mouth has become gentled the feet and the flanks have become gentled, and the whole personality is gentled.
Gentling a horse is a labor of necessity and demands the expense of much energy and much time, of much focusing, and as that special moment transpires during which a horse becomes easily accustomed and becomes innocent to the handler, the horse may be said to go gentle.
Thus, Mr. Thomas was challenging his dying father not to be broken, not to be tamed by the cruel wiles of our existence, and not to be broken and not to be tamed by our essential achievement into nonexistence.
