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. Thomas's poem can be read not as a plea to persevere, but as a bitter backlash against the cruelty of life. It was written during a period when Thomas watched his alcoholic father succumb to apathy, illness, blindness, and ultimately death. His father, a schoolteacher, was profoundly disappointed with his station in life. Dylan Thomas inherited his father's alcoholism and bitterness, with both men using rage to shape their worldview and conception of what it meant to be a poet. The son was saddened to see his father's rage subsiding. The poem reflects a son unprepared to accept his father's death, hoping the dying man will also rage against that acceptance.