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Why did Dylan Thomas choose the title "Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night"?

This poem is actually untitled and has become known as "Do not go gentle into that good night," its first line, as a result. You can tell because, in professional publications of the poem, only the first letter of the first word is capitalized instead of each significant word being capitalized. It is an appropriate title, however, because it encapsulates one of the main purposes of the poem: it comprises an attempt to persuade the speaker's father to fight against death and not go quietly into its symbolic darkness. In line 16, the narrator refers to his father as being on "that sad height," a figurative precipice that we can understand to signify a choice between moving forward into the darkness or stepping backward into the light. The speaker urges his father to "rage against the dying of the light" and to resist any desire to slip away. The line used as the poem's title does likewise.

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