Facing Death

 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.

     This is an excerpt from the poem “Do not go gentle into that good night” by Dylan Thomas. While I’m not personally much of a poetry enthusiast, this one caught my attention while I was browsing for a mentor poem primarily because I’ve heard it before: in the film Interstellar, Dr. Brand (Michael Caine) recites this poem to the crew of the Endurance before they depart on their fateful mission to save the human race from extinction.

     

     The message of Thomas’ work is that we mortals have to fight to survive, and that we should continue this fight right up into our final moments, rather than passively submitting to our impending doom. It speaks to the dignity of facing and “raging against” death, an ideal echoed throughout countless works of literature and film. 

     In the context of Interstellar, the inclusion of the poem fit like a glove with the overarching plot of the film. Humanity was on its last legs: a global catastrophe known as the Blight resulted in irreversible damage to the Earth and a crew of experienced physicists were sent on a mission to find a suitable refuge on another planet, in another galaxy. Rather than giving up and passively accepting the destruction of their home and their race, the members of Project Endurance used every resource at their disposal and every last measure of hope to try and save humanity.

     “Do not go gentle into that good night” relies heavily on the symbolic tie of life and death to night and day. Although simple (and a little cliche), this metaphor perfectly captures his point because a day is a categorically short measure of time when regarding the many decades a human can live to see, just like how the decades of said life are actually insignificant in a grander, universal scale. More simply, life is short and precious, just like the few hours of sunlight we get in a day. Because it’s so short and precious, we shouldn’t be too willing to give it up, even when we’re old and weak. We have to live in a manner befitting life itself, akin to a bright and raging fire, and when the time comes, to stand and die with blazing dignity, rather than to meekly flicker and wither away into mere cinders.