In the following excerpt, Murdy explores the structure and depth of "Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night. "

"Do not go gentle into that good night" is perhaps too often considered lightly as only simple iteration. Cid Corman even believes that "the set form of the villanelle treads Thomas's feet." By definition the villanelle is restrictive, because it demands nineteen lines on two rhymes in six stanzas, the first and third lines of the opening tercet recurring alternately at the end of the other tercets, both being repeated at the end of the concluding quatrain. Within this structure, however, Thomas creates a poem of great force, beauty, and tenderness, in which sound and sense are exquisitely blended.

Thomas's villanelle is a plea to his ill and aging father to die as wise men, good men, wild men, grave men die and as the father himself has...