Those that master the villanelle, who craft so eloquently the two repeated lines, soar above the art of poetry. Dylan Thomas, among others, creates two lines which appeal to the imminent end which everyone faces: death. Thomas writes this poem in response to his dying father, proven by his last shift in stanza six, "And you my father." Thomas meddles in the phase of life where he must wrestle with the concept of death both tangibly and emotionally. He moves into the philosophy of Albert Camus, taking of the role of Sisyphus who faces his mortality as he rolls his stone daily up the hill. But Thomas never moves into Sisyphus's ardent nostalgia for life, his momentary lapses from the imminence of death.

No, Thomas seems to chide the men who pursued pleasure, who relied on their "good deeds." He tells them to forget this, that all they have left is the struggle before death. What remains is their writing or their legacy, but the men Thomas mentions possess no legacy. They were too caught up in themselves. Camus believes that in the end the only thing of matter is one's experiences. Thomas's philosophy (from this poem at least) seeps with a Byronesque tangibility, a need to embrace the earth, to leave a mark and then escape, fighting into the night.

These repeated images of fighting and raging peek through the poem in the two repeated lines. The villanelle allows Thomas to emphasize his point. Unlike Camus, who relies on the past, on the beauty of experience, Thomas writes that man must rise and leave life with fiber and fight. He should leave behind a legacy of strength. In the end though, Thomas merely wants his father to fight, for the tears of death to subside and for some sort of comfort in his struggle.