The Music of Language (Cont.)

On Twitter, someone posted a clip of Anthony Hopkins reciting the last stanza of the Dylan Thomas poem Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night, in a post related to Brexit. I was moved by the natural prosody and the natural rhythms in the words in its recitation.

It is written in the form of a villanelle, a ballad-like song with no fixed form. Both Thomas and Hopkins seem to evoke a march rhythm. In both cases, I am interpreting it in an A Dorian context (Am/D).

Play it through yourself. "Rage, rage against the dying of the light" can be a repeating refrain, even softly under the rest of the poem. This can also be used as a kind of soft protest march. At a slower tempo, it could be dirge-like.