The Music of Language

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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). "Rage, rage against the dying of the light" can be a repeating refrain, even softly under the rest of the poem. It's a kind of "soft" protest march. At a slower tempo, it could be dirge-like.

Audio export from Finale

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