Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night
Dylan Thomas
1914–1953
a p enguin since 1996
Dylan Thomas
Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night
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Dylan Thomas’s Collected Poems 1934–1952 published by J. M. Dent & Sons 1952
This edition published in Penguin Classics 2025 001
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ISBN : 978–0–241–74626–4
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Prologue
This day winding down now
At God speeded summer’s end
In the torrent salmon sun,
In my seashaken house
On a breakneck of rocks
Tangled with chirrup and fruit, Froth, flute, fin and quill
At a wood’s dancing hoof, By scummed, starfish sands
With their fishwife cross
Gulls, pipers, cockles, and sails,
Out there, crow black, men
Tackled with clouds, who kneel
To the sunset nets,
Geese nearly in heaven, boys
Stabbing, and herons, and shells
That speak seven seas, Eternal waters away
From the cities of nine
Days’ night whose towers will catch
In the religious wind
Like stalks of tall, dry straw, At poor peace I sing
To you, strangers, (though song
Is a burning and crested act, The fire of birds in
The world’s turning wood, For my sawn, splay sounds), Out of these seathumbed leaves
That will fly and fall
Like leaves of trees and as soon
Crumble and undie
Into the dogdayed night.
Seaward the salmon, sucked sun slips, And the dumb swans drub blue
My dabbed bay’s dusk, as I hack
This rumpus of shapes
For you to know
How I, a spinning man, Glory also this star, bird
Roared, sea born, man torn, blood blest.
Hark: I trumpet the place,
From fish to jumping hill! Look:
I build my bellowing ark
To the best of my love
As the flood begins, Out of the fountainhead
Of fear, rage red, manalive, Molten and mountainous to stream
Over the wound asleep
Sheep white hollow farms