SOURCE: Cyr, Marc D. “Dylan Thomas's ‘Do not go gentle into that good night’: Through ‘Lapis Lazuli’ to King Lear.” Papers on Language & Literature 34, no. 2 (spring 1998): 207-17.

In the following essay, Cyr contends that Thomas's treatment of impending death in “Do not go gentle into that good night” is more closely connected to Shakespeare's play rather than to Yeats's poetry, as is commonly believed.

Dylan Thomas's “Do not go gentle into that good night” has been noted to bear the influence of and even echo W. B. Yeats, especially “Lapis Luzuli,” and, secondarily via this poem, Shakespeare's King Lear. One scholar notes its “Yeatsian overtones” (Fraser 51); another judges Thomas's villanelle to have “much of the concentrated fury of expression which the poetry of the older Yeats contained, but … more tenderness and sympathy” (Stanford 117), and goes on to say, citing “Lapis Lazuli,” that “Yeats described the poet as one...