While this poem has inspired a significant amount of unique discussion and analysis from such critics as Seamus Heaney, Jonathan Westphal, and Walford Davies, some interpretations of the poem’s meaning is under general consensus. “This is obviously a threshold poem about death”, Heaney writes, and Westphal agrees, noting that Thomas is advocating active resistance to death. Heaney thinks that the poem’s structure as a villanelle turns upon itself, advancing and retiring to and from a resolution in order to convey “a vivid figure of the union of opposites that encapsulates “the balance between natural grief and the recognition of necessity which pervades the poem as a whole.”

Westphal writes that the “sad height” Thomas refers to in line 16 is “of particular importance and interest in appreciating the poem as a whole”. He asserts that it was not a literal structure, such as a bier, not only because of the literal fact that Thomas’ father died after the poem’s publication, but also because “it would be pointless for Thomas to advise his father not to ‘go gentle’ if he were already dead ... Instead, he thinks that Thomas’ phrase refers to “a metaphorical plateau of aloneness and loneliness before death”. In his 2014 “Writers of Wales” biography of Thomas, Davies disagrees, instead believing that the imagery is more allusive in nature, and that it “clearly evokes both King Lear on the heath and Gloucester thinking he is at Dover Cliff.”