Cat on a Hot Tin Roof and again in the 1974 version. The ways in which humans deal with death are also at the focus of this play, as are the futility and nihilism some encounter when confronted with imminent mortality. Similar ideas are found in Dylan Thomas's "Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night", which Williams excerpted and added as an epigraph to his 1974 version. These lines are appropriate, as Thomas wrote the poem to his own dying father. Additionally, in one of his many drafts, in a footnote on Big Daddy's action in the third act, Williams deems "Cat on a Hot
Do not go gentle into that good night before Christmas 1952. It has no title other than its first line, "Do not go gentle into that good night", a line that appears as a refrain throughout the poem along with its other refrain, "Rage, rage against the dying of the light". The poem currently remains under copyright, although the text is available online. The villanelle consists of five stanzas of three lines (tercets) followed by a single stanza of four lines (a quatrain) for a total of nineteen lines. It is structured by two repeating rhymes and two refrains: the first line of the first stanza serves as