Introductory Paragraph Dylan Thomas's villanelle “Don't Be Kind to That Good Night” is addressed to his elderly father. The poem is notable in many ways, particularly because contrary to more common poetic treatments of the inevitability of death, which advocate serenity or celebrate the peace that death provides, this poem urges resistance and anger in the face of death. He justifies that unusual attitude by describing the anger and resistance to death of four types of men, all of whom can conjure up the image of a complete and satisfying life denied to them by death. First body paragraph The first tercet of the intricate rhyme villanelle opens with a catchy line. The adjective gentle appears where we would expect the adverb delicately. The strange diction suggests that gentle can describe both the one who goes (i.e., dies gently) and the person (i.e., gentleman) who faces death. Furthermore, the speaker characterizes “night,” here clearly a figure of death, as “good.” However, in the next line, the speaker urges the elders to violently resist death, characterized as “the end of the day” and “the death of the light.” Indeed, the first three verses argue that, no matter how good death may be, the elderly should refuse to die gently, should rave and rage passionately against death. The second body of the paragraph describes the second triplet. The third body of the paragraph: the “good men” The fourth body of the paragraph: the “wild men” The fifth body of the paragraph: the “serious men” Concluding paragraphThe speaker then invites his elderly father to join these men raging against death. Only in this last stanza do we discover that the entire poem is addressed to the speaker's father and that, despite the generalized statements about old age and the focus on types of men, the poem is a personal lyric. The edge of death becomes a “grim height,” the pinnacle of wisdom and experience that old age reaches includes the sad awareness of life's failure to fulfill the vision we all pursue. The depth and complexity of the speaker's sadness is strikingly given by the second line when he asks his father to curse and bless him. These opposites richly suggest several related possibilities.