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Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night Analysis

Decent Essays

Given that death eventually comes to every one of us, how can someone fight death? Dylan Thomas’s “Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night” lays out his case. The opening lines are a wonderful beginning to what, on the surface, seems to be a poem about the transition from day to night. But, upon closer reading, the poem is a much more complex piece on grief and death. Thomas uses light and dark imagery, diction, and anaphora to demonstrate the author’s thoughts on death and the questions he raises on its inevitability. Such questions are a product of Thomas’s own life in which his father is dying and Thomas must navigate his father’s suffering and Thomas’s own grief. The first line of Thomas’s villanelle is a command that shares the same name …show more content…

Lines seven, ten, and thirteen all contain a word that denotes a certain lightness. Thomas writes, “Good men, the last wave by, crying how bright” (Thomas 7), which shows the reader Thomas’s thinking that in the face of death, even the greatest among people, will simply watch their final fleeting moments of greatness pass by without fighting to hold on. Even the “green bay” (Thomas 8) helps strengthen the image of light by personifying the “frail deeds” of the men who were once great. In line 10, Thomas tempers his previous lines when he writes, “Wild men who caught and sang the sun in flight” (Thomas 10). To Thomas, life must be lived to its fullest, but one cannot do so irresponsibly and then learn to late that, in fact, life never had that much happiness. Finally, the last light image that is not one of the refrains is, “Grave men, near death, who see with blinding sight” (Thomas 13) is one of Thomas’s main arguments throughout the poem. That message being that even in the face of impending death, one can still live life and that dying, though inevitable in each person’s journey, need not be an unwelcome …show more content…

The use of simile in the line, “Blind eyes could blaze like meteors and be gay (Thomas 14)” contains an interesting choice of words. Though “meteor” is a common word that most people know the definition of, Thomas uses a now obsolete definition to compare the short-lived trail left behind by a meteor as a metaphor for life. Thomas knows that life is finite. All he wants to make clear to his reader is that even though death is always right in front of everyone, life can still be

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