'A conventional poem starts with the personal and opens out into the universal. Thomas starts with the rhetorical and the universal and turns it at the end into the personal', observes the poet Kate Clanchy.

Distressed at the imminent death of the father with whom he shared an intimate intellectual relationship, Thomas passionately invades the perspectives of men approaching their death, frantically urging his father to resist the call of death.

To share such deeply personal emotions, Thomas adopted the highly constraining form of the French villanelle: lines one and three of the initial tercet repeating alternately (like its two rhymes) as the third line of four successive tercets (each line composed of ten syllables) and combining as the end quatrain's final couplet:

Do not go gentle into that good night.
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

'Do not go gentle into that good night' is the best-known villanelle in English. 'It's a very hard form within which to work', notes the poet Owen Shears. 'It's very strict and I think that, really, the great success of this poem is that the form seems to be born from the subject; it doesn't seem to be imposed upon the word - it seems to be completely natural.'

Also contributing to the programme are the poets Kate Clanchy, Michael Donaghy, Sophie Hannah, Roger McGough and Jamie McKendrick.

www.poets.org/poems/poems.cfm?prmID=1159
Online text and Dylan Thomas reading the poem