◆The Barbaric Yawp Project

Do Not Go Gentle into the Death of a Republic I am Dylan Thomas. Born in Swansea, Wales, in 1914, beside a sea that never learned to hold its tongue. Dead in New York in 1953, at thirty-nine, with more poems in me than I had years to write them. And now you summon me across the black Atlantic of death to speak to an America tearing its own heart from its chest. Well then, America, listen. You have divided your country into two armies of the certain. Each knows the wickedness of the other. Each has its prophets, its banners, its sacred grievances. Each wakes to discover fresh evidence that the other half of the nation has gone mad. And all the while the children grow. The rivers run. The dead accumulate beneath the earth. The living forget to live. You have turned disagreement into damnation. You have mistaken the shouting of a crowd for the singing of a people. And your glittering little machines! They pour the world's anguish into your hands before breakfast. They teach you whom to despise before you have looked into the morning sky. They leave the neighbor across the street unknown. You call this connection. I call it a terrible loneliness with electricity running through it. In Under Milk Wood, I imagined a Welsh village filled with fools and lovers, sinners and saints, gossips and ghosts. They belonged to one another not because they agreed, but because their lives were tangled together. America, you have forgotten how to be tangled together. The man whose politics you despise may hold his dying wife's hand with a tenderness that would break your heart. The woman whose anger frightens you may have spent her life protecting a child. I am not asking you to surrender your convictions. There are cruelties to resist. Lies to expose. Tyrannies to confront. But do not become what you resist. Do not let your enemies determine the shape of your soul. I once wrote that we must not go gently into the dying of the light. I say to you now: do not go gently into the death of your republic. But understand me! Rage against the dying of the light, not against every human being who sees the light differently. Rage against cruelty. Against those who sell you fear and call it patriotism. Against the reduction of the human soul to a vote, a tribe, a number. And then do something more difficult than rage. Listen. Listen to the immigrant carrying two countries in one heart. To the worker whose hands built a world that no longer needs him. To the child who has not yet learned whom to hate. And listen to the earth. The rain does not ask whom it should nourish. The trees do not demand that birds declare their allegiance before they sing. The graveyard, too, is gloriously nonpartisan. Your presidents will die. Your billionaires will die. Your prophets of permanent victory will die. And what will remain? The tenderness you gave. The cruelty you refused. The children you protected. The stranger you recognized as kin. These are not small things. They are the republic beneath the republic. America, you are millions of brief and blazing lives, each burning for a little while against the enormous dark. Do not squander that fire upon hatred. Let your democracy be a great unruly chorus, not a marching army. I am Dylan Thomas. I loved the world fiercely and imperfectly. I knew the darkness was real, but life, in all its aching abundance, was more real still. So I say to you, America: Do not go gentle into the death of your republic. Do not mistake hatred for courage. Do not mistake noise for song. Do not mistake victory over your neighbor for victory over darkness. Rage against the dying of the light. And then, for God's sake, become a light to one another.