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Do Not Go Gentle Into Tha It's Worth A Thousand Words

Decent Essays

The ways death is approached and depicted in literature are diverse and numerous. Not unlike the ways different religions throughout the world and history have interpreted, and continue to interpret, this inevitable phenomenon, art and literature offer a wide variety of views as to what happens after death and what dying means. Of course, there are some common threads and themes associated with dying that are frequently seen and used, both in prose and in poetry. The tropes of death are familiar and common, but each writer still brings its own vision and frames it in its own personal way. Ernest Dowson and Dylan Thomas are two writers who, while not separated by a long period of time, came from very different period and wrote in different literary movements. Despite those differences, they share some similarities in the way they chose to depict and portray death in their poetry. In the poems Do Not Go Gentle Into …show more content…

Links between death and darkness, death and night, and death and a permanent ending are ones that have been made over and over throughout history. Similarly, the idea of death as a deliverance from the sufferings of human existence and as the journey to something better is recurrent in art and literature, but also in many religious beliefs. By playing with both tropes simultaneously, Thomas and Dowson offer a vulnerable and realistic portrayal of many people’s feelings about death. The duality, the uncertainty, seems conflicting but instead it widens the scope of the poems and offers a broader depiction of this inevitable human phenomenon. Neither poet gives a definitive answer as to what his belief about what lies beyond death is and yet, neither poems feel incomplete. They both pose a question rather than giving an answer, a tentative exploration instead of firm

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