Which Dylan Thomas poem is recited in Nolan's Interstellar?

The Dylan Thomas poem recited in Christopher Nolan’s Interstellar is “Do not go gentle into that good night.” Its repeated refrain, “Rage, rage against the dying of the light,” gives the film one of its most recognizable literary motifs. Professor John Brand, played by Michael Caine, recites the poem in connection with humanity’s struggle to survive and resist extinction.

Thomas wrote the poem in 1947, and it was first published in 1951. It is a villanelle, a tightly patterned nineteen-line form built around two recurring refrains. The speaker urges his father to resist death, while the poem’s middle stanzas consider wise, good, wild, and grave men confronting mortality in different ways.

Interstellar repeatedly returns to the poem rather than using it as a one-off quotation. Its language about darkness, dying light, resistance, and a father’s final moments echoes the film’s concerns with aging, separation, sacrifice, and the survival of the human species. The poem is sometimes misremembered as “Rage Against the Dying of the Light,” but that is a refrain within the work, not its title. The canonical answer is the poem’s full title: “Do not go gentle into that good night.”