Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night
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Motivation
When someone close to me was diagnosed with cancer, I thought back to my favorite poem ‘Do not go gentle into that good night’ by Dylan Thomas.
Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
Though wise men at their end know dark is right,
Because their words had forked no lightning they
Do not go gentle into that good night.Good men, the last wave by, crying how bright
Their frail deeds might have danced in a green bay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.Wild men who caught and sang the sun in flight,
And learn, too late, they grieved it on its way,
Do not go gentle into that good night.Grave men, near death, who see with blinding sight
Blind eyes could blaze like meteors and be gay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.And you, my father, there on the sad height,
Curse, bless, me now with your fierce tears, I pray.
Do not go gentle into that good night.
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.Dylan Thomas
It is a beautiful poem that, at least in the way I interpret it, concerns the last stage of our life. I find that it tells us that life is too precious to slowly fade away and just give in to death. Instead, you should fight until the very end to enjoy every single moment of our short life because there is not much more we can do. As Gandalf the Grey once said: “All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given to us.”
After rediscovering my favorite poem, I went on quite the deep dive of poems and art concerning death. Since death is probably the second most frequently explored topic in art, behind love, it was no surprise to me that I came across many beautiful poems covering this particular inevitability of our existence. I began to notice that most of the poems could roughly be organized into two categories.
The first category concerns poems that paint death as an adversary of life that we need to defend against. ‘Do not go gentle into that good night’ would fall into this category. The other category presents death as a part of life that we have to accept, and that can also carry a certain beauty with it. Of course, this categorization is very subjective, and I am certain that there are people who would assign the same poem to opposite categories.
After my deep dive, I decided to gather a few of the poems I came across into an artwork that would display the contrast between those two categories.
The Artwork
The artwork consists of five poems that are arranged to form two characters. The left character represents a human figure carrying a shield and raising a sword towards the character on the right. The character on the right represents the grim reaper, which is commonly referred to as the personification of death.
The human and the grim reaper are supposed to represent the two opposite categories of death related poems I mentioned in the last section. The human is formed by the verses of ‘Do not go gentle into that good night’ and portrays the rebellion against death. The grim reaper is made up of the verses of the following four poems, which I interpret to portray death less as an adversary but more as a part of life.
- When Great Trees Fall - Maya Angelou
- Do Not Stand At My Grave And Weep - Claire Harner
- The Mower - Philip Larkin
- The Letter - Thomas Bailey Aldrich
The full text of the four poems can be found in the appendix of this article.
Technical Details
The artwork is drawn on two DIN A3 canvases by a plotter that I built myself. A plotter is a CNC-machine that can move a drawing device, such as a pen, to draw on a canvas. CNC-machines that work in two dimensions are usually controlled based on vector graphics. In simple terms, vector graphics are images that are made up of lines defined by coordinates instead of pixels that are used in raster graphics.
I typically use Adobe Illustrator for creating vector graphics for all my plotter projects that are not generated by some software that I have written. Illustrator has a feature that can fill a shape with some text. I first tried to use this feature to generate the characters I needed for this artwork. However, I quickly found that this feature is not suited for creating actual good-looking illustrations.
Additionally, for plotting text, you want to use a single line font. However, since most operating systems and software do not support single line fonts, you cannot just paste the text of a poem into a vector graphics program such as Adobe Illustrator. To mitigate this problem, I have written a Python script that can generate single line paths for a given text and export them as an SVG file. I used that script to generate the single line paths for all the poems. I then ended up aligning all the words by hand, which took quite a bit of time but also allowed me to add a certain human touch to the alignment which the automatic generation could not generate on its own. The following image shows the differences between some automatically generated text alignments and one I created by hand.
Timelapse
You can find a timelapse of my plotter drawing this artwork in the video below or on my YouTube channel.
Appendix
Micheal Sheen performs ‘Do not go gentle into that good night’
For those of you that like Dylan Thomas poem, I can highly recommend Micheal Sheen’s performance of it. It’s available on YouTube (just click here or on the image below).
When Great Trees Fall - Maya Angelou
When great trees fall,
rocks on distant hills shudder,
lions hunker down
in tall grasses,
and even elephants
lumber after safety.
When great trees fall
in forests,
small things recoil into silence,
their senses
eroded beyond fear.When great souls die,
the air around us becomes
light, rare, sterile.
We breathe, briefly.
Our eyes, briefly,
see with
a hurtful clarity.
Our memory, suddenly sharpened,
examines,
gnaws on kind words
unsaid,
promised walks
never taken.Great souls die and
our reality, bound to
them, takes leave of us.
Our souls,
dependent upon their
nurture,
now shrink, wizened.
Our minds, formed
and informed by their
radiance,
fall away.
We are not so much maddened
as reduced to the unutterable ignorance
of dark, cold
caves.And when great souls die,
after a period peace blooms,
slowly and always
irregularly. Spaces fill
with a kind of
soothing electric vibration.
Our senses, restored, never
to be the same, whisper to us.
They existed. They existed.
We can be. Be and be
better. For they existed. Maya Angelou
Do Not Stand At My Grave And Weep - Claire Harner
Do not stand
By my grave, and weep.
I am not there,
I do not sleep-
I am the thousand winds that blow
I am the diamond glints in snow
I am the sunlight on ripened grain,
I am the gentle, autumn rain.
As you awake with morning’s hush,
I am the swift up-flinging rush
Of quiet birds in circled flight,
I am the day transcending soft night.Do not stand
By my grave, and cry-
I am not there.
I did not die. Claire Harner
The Mower - Philip Larkin
The mower stalled, twice; kneeling, I found
A hedgehog jammed up against the blades,
Killed. It had been in the long grass.
I had seen it before, and even fed it, once.
Now I had mauled its unobtrusive world
Unmendably. Burial was no help:Next morning I got up and it did not.
The first day after a death, the new absence
Is always the same; we should be carefulOf each other, we should be kind
While there is still time. Philip Larkin
The Letter - Thomas Bailey Aldrich
I held his letter in my hand,
And even while I read
The lightning flashed across the land
The word that he was dead.
How strange it seemed! His living voice
Was speaking from the page
Those courteous phrases, tersely choice,
Light-hearted, witty, sage.
I wondered what it was that died!
The man himself was here,
His modesty, his scholar's pride,
His soul serene and clear.
These neither death nor time shall dim,
Still, this sad thing must be —
Henceforth I may not speak to him,
Though he can speak to me! Thomas Bailey Aldrich