There are certain poems  – certain texts – which, I suspect, change as we get older. Not necessarily because the words themselves change, but because we bring rather different experiences to our reading of them.

Dylan Thomas‘s ‘Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night’ is perhaps one such poem.

For many years, the opening of the refrain – ‘Rage, rage against the dying of the light’ – has been almost ubiquitous. It appears on classroom walls (including mine); in collections of inspirational quotations; surprisingly frequently in newspaper articles and opinion pieces; and inevitably, on social media. Its familiarity perhaps makes it a little too easy to overlook what Thomas was actually saying.

I don’t think the rage in this poem is necessarily anger. It is resistance. An insistence upon the value of life, even when confronted with the knowledge that it must eventually end.

If you’ve never seen it performed, I’m not sure anyone does it better than Michael Sheen.

Thomas gives us several different kinds of men, each confronting their mortality in their own way. The wise, the good, the wild, and the grave all have their own reasons for resisting. They’re united by their refusal to surrender, but their experiences of life, and their reasons for holding on to it, are quite different.

It’s only a few days since I wrote about Albert Camus and his reflections on Sisyphus. I’m sure that colours today’s thoughts.  The stone will always roll back down the mountain. The struggle is ultimately futile (at least in any conventional sense), but that doesn’t make the struggle meaningless. There is something profoundly human in continuing to push against what we know we cannot ultimately overcome.

I also find myself thinking about Shakespeare‘s King Lear. There is, admittedly, no shortage of raging in that particular play, but I think the connection goes deeper.

Lear’s journey is partly one of discovering his own vulnerability, of recognising the fragility of human existence and, eventually, of understanding something about the suffering of others. His defiance of the storm is both an assertion of his own strength and an increasingly desperate confrontation with his powerlessness.

Perhaps some of these ideas become more immediate as we get older.

At 17, we can understand the poem, appreciate its extraordinary construction and write a perfectly respectable essay about its treatment of mortality. But there’s a difference between knowing intellectually that our parents will grow old and beginning to witness it. When someone who has always seemed a permanent fixture in your life becomes visibly frailer, something shifts. You begin to understand their mortality differently.

And then, inevitably, your own.

I don’t say this to suggest that younger readers can’t appreciate Thomas, this poem, or Lear. Rather, ‘Do Not Go Gentle’ is one of those poems which has something different to offer us at different stages of our lives.

There’s also something particularly tender about the fact that this is a poem addressed to Thomas’s father. Beneath all that defiance is an expression of love: an unwillingness to accept the loss of someone whose continued existence matters enormously.

Perhaps that is what makes the poem so affecting. Its rage isn’t simply about death. It is about life, and the extraordinary difficulty of letting go of it.