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No Ultimate Message in Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night by Dylan Thomas

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One of his best works, “Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night” by Dylan Thomas, is a famous example of the poetic form called villanelle. Enriched with a raw emotional power, Thomas uses this poem to address his dying father and encourages him to defy his fate and cling onto his life for as long as he can. As a result, the poem shifts from an unclear yet universal audience to the poet’s own dying father, thus making the poet the speaker as well. Though the poem comprises of various poetic devices such as metaphors, visual imagery, alliteration, repetition, assonance, (and many more), the speaker’s critical and insurgent tone is considered the most important aspect as this is what has has preserved the poem amongst the most-read works in …show more content…

They should glare and glow “like meteors” and not like dim candles. In the last stanza, the speaker refers to his ailing father, on his deathbed and asks him to weep fiercely, as this serves as both a blessing and a curse for him, for his heartbreaking death, and if possible a heroic survival. The poem ends with the same two lines being repeated, thus the poet instructing his father to not submit to death but “rave” and rant and fight it every step of the way.

The poem is in form of a villanelle, consisting of the rhyme scheme ABA throughout the poem. There are two major extended metaphors in the poem- the “day” which stands for a person’s lifespan and all their actions and memories; and the dark “night” which stands for afterlife or the void. These metaphors are also the starting rhymes for the poem (for line A and line B), and thus all the following lines rhyme with these metaphors. This shows the constant cycle of day and night thus life and death, emphasizing on the inevitability and continuity of this process. Also in the first stanza, the metaphor for death is expressed as “good night” (in line one), “close of day” (in line two) and “dying of the light” (line three), where all are placed at the end of their respective lines; thus again showing what lies for all at the time of their end.
In the repeated line “Do not go gentle into that good

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