ACADEMIA Letters

Ways to Go: Death, Poetry, and Philosophy

Manfred Malzahn

Over the years, I have been led to believe that those poems which are the most widely read
tend to also be the most frequently misconstrued. Even some of the most perceptive students
will tell you, for instance, that the speaker of Sonnet 75 in the Amoretti is located on a beach,
in spite of the “One day” opening that indicates his spatial as well as temporal distance from
the narrated scene. And many will be convinced that the speaker in Marvell’s “Coy Mistress”
must end up having his way with her, in spite of his talk of graves and flesh-eating worms that
is highly unlikely to have put his addressee in an amorous mood just before his final rhetorical
flourish.
Likewise, it seems almost mandatory to read Dylan Thomas’s “Do not go gentle into that
good night” as words actually spoken by a son at his father’s death bed. Were this the case, I
would wish that the father had enough strength left to deliver one last hefty jab to the speaker’s
jaw. What kind of person would have the infernal cheek to tell his dying father how to die,
instead of delivering words of comfort, or instead of just staying quiet? The injunction to
“rage against the dying of the light” makes a lot more sense if understood as wishful and
silent thinking: an internal monologue driven by powerless anger at the inevitable end of a
loved one’s life.
In the context of author/reader communication, the poem can be taken as a polemic against
a philosophy of death that goes back to the Stoic tradition. The notion that “virtuous men
pass mildly away,” invoked in the first line of Donne’s “A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning”,
seems to have been held in particularly high regard in the Victorian era. A collection of poems
published just after Queen Victoria’s demise contains a similar sentiment, expressed in some
lines that rather look as though they had especially prompted Dylan Thomas to respond:

Old men go gently to their separate rest;

Academia Letters, January 2021 ©2021 by Academia Inc. — Open Access — Distributed under CC BY 4.0

Corresponding Author: Manfred Malzahn, mmalzahn@uaeu.ac.ae

Citation: Malzahn, M. (2021). Ways to Go: Death, Poetry, and Philosophy. Academia Letters, Article 210.
https://doi.org/10.20935/AL210.

1
 The warrior’s heart subdues; the poet’s song
With twilight sweetness sings of strife repressed,
And peace at last grown strong.

Old age goes gently to Imperial Death

Mantled in night, who, gazing isolate
From Titan hills to dusky valleys, saith
Come, now the hour is late.

These stanzas come from the poem “Worn Hands”, written by John Runcie (1864-1939)
and published in his 1905 collection Songs by the Stoep. The title of the book bespeaks its
origin in South Africa, where a stoep is what is elsewhere known as a konde, porch, or veranda.
The author is certainly a rather marginal figure today, and he does not seem to have ranked
among literary giants in his lifetime either, but there is at least a fair chance that Dylan Thomas
saw a copy of the slim volume that was deemed worthy of a 2019 facsimile by Wentworth Press
in the USA, with the generic comment that accompanies each item in their classic reprint
series: “This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important, and is part of
the knowledge base of civilization as we know it.”1
Never mind that the last part of this sentence sounds a tad pleonastic—I am as grateful to
the Wentworth Press as I am to the National Poetry Library in London, for helping me to track
down what I dimly remembered having seen mentioned as a possible, if obscure, influence on
the famous Welsh poet. Never mind either whether such an influence is or can be documented.
What appears obvious is that Dylan Thomas was riled by expressions of a certain expectation
or obligation: one in which Victorian sentimentalism blended with a self-image of the English,
British, or Anglophone character as restrained, and averse to histrionics.
Dylan Thomas’s poem questions a cultural attitude that favours a death without undue
fuss on the part of the departing, who is not to let the side down: he may be inwardly shaken,
but should not be outwardly stirred at the approach of death, to be greeted in the manner of
‘Alright, officer, I’ll come quietly,’ even without the prospect of an afterlife. The speaker in
Philip Larkin’s “Aubade”, for instance, finds the thought of total annihilation horrendous, but
still opines that “Death is no different whined at than withstood.” Clive James, in “Event
Horizon”, suggests that the chilling expectation of total non-existence may even carry one
small but important benefit: “The only blessing of the void to come / Is that you can relax.”
1
I obtained a copy in spite of the firm’s inclusion in a list of “Unacceptable Book Publishers”—see
https://blogs.tccd.edu/cataloging/wp-content/uploads/sites/201/2017/05/Unacceptable-Publishers-to-Order-
From-2016-11-07.pdf

Academia Letters, January 2021 ©2021 by Academia Inc. — Open Access — Distributed under CC BY 4.0

Corresponding Author: Manfred Malzahn, mmalzahn@uaeu.ac.ae

Citation: Malzahn, M. (2021). Ways to Go: Death, Poetry, and Philosophy. Academia Letters, Article 210.
https://doi.org/10.20935/AL210.

2
 Stoic philosophers such as Epictetus held that a memento mori should serve as a guide to
the good life, and not as a source of fear. Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar shows Stoic fortitude
when he says “Cowards die many times before their deaths,” just before he goes to meet his
own; and Stoic advice, moreover, did not limit itself to facing the inescapable with equanimity.
“Choose to die well while you can,” said Gaius Musonius Rufus, arguing that a prolongation
of life may be bought at the cost of making a dignified departure.
At a time such as ours, when people’s right to determine the time and manner of their
deaths is the subject of much ethical and legal debate, we might want to re-examine our stan-
dards, values and practices in the light of Graeco-Roman antiquity. Today’s most pressing
question is arguably—see Larkin’s abovementioned line—not whether to rage against the dy-
ing of the light, but whether to submit to any degree of indignity that old age and/or illness
may heap upon us. In this context, I feel that the poem “Old Woman” by Iain Crichton Smith
(1928-1998) deserves to be at least as widely known as Dylan Thomas’s. The speaker watches
the old woman of the title being fed, “half dead, blindly searching the spoon,” by her husband
who prays to God to let her die. The speaker’s reaction is given in the two middle stanzas:

Outside, the grass was raging. There I sat

imprisoned in my pity and my shame
that men and women having suffered time
should sit in such a place, in such a state

and wished to be away, yes, to be far away

with athletes, heroes, Greeks or Roman men
who pushed their bitter spears into a vein
and would not spend an hour with such decay.

I recommend a reading of the whole poem to anyone who does not yet know it; and I also
recommend a reading of the book La Vieillesse (1970) by Simone de Beauvoir, translated into
English as Old Age in 1972. Take it as a memento senectutis which may help to convince you
that, like death, old age is—as Simone de Beauvoir puts it—“not solely a biological, but also
a cultural fact.”

Academia Letters, January 2021 ©2021 by Academia Inc. — Open Access — Distributed under CC BY 4.0

Corresponding Author: Manfred Malzahn, mmalzahn@uaeu.ac.ae

Citation: Malzahn, M. (2021). Ways to Go: Death, Poetry, and Philosophy. Academia Letters, Article 210.
https://doi.org/10.20935/AL210.