Good Critical Thinking On Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night

In “Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night,” it becomes almost impossible to separate Dylan Thomas, the poet who has written this poem, from the speaker of this poem, who is urging father to struggle fiercely with death. In other words, Thomas is used the speaker of this poem to say things he was probably not able to say to his own ageing father, whose health was declining and death was impending. The fact that the speaker has several autobiographical elements cannot be denied, which makes him the poet’s alter ego, but he is still not quite the same man as the poet himself. Interestingly, it is only near the end of the poem, in line 17, that it becomes apparent that the first-person narrative is being used by the speaker. Although the poem is the speaker’s plea to his dying father, but it has several underlying themes such as family, mortality, old age, transience, wisdom and knowledge.
Although this is the most poem famous poem written by Dylan Thomas, he left it untitled, for some unknown reason, and thus, Thomas’s poem became known by its first line, “Do not go gentle into that good night.” This line, which is not only the title this poem goes by but is also repeated throughout the poem, employs irony because of the fact that death has been represented using the phrase “good night.” Death is never looked upon as a good thing, especially since it comes after “day,” which represents life. This poem has many settings. The settings over the course of the compact nineteen lines keep changing. In one line the setting is a “green bay,” in another it is a “sad height,” and while the readers may feel as if they are traveling through nature, the speaker is just metaphorically describing death, life, and struggle as she sits beside his dying father.
Considering the fact that this poem is being spoken by a son to his father, the intensity and power of familial bonds is being suggested by this poem. Moreover, in doing so, the poet has reversed traditional roles, since rather than the father, it is the son who is giving the advice, and instead of the son, it is the father who needs help and encouragement, and is weak. In this poem, the speaker is also exploring what it means to get nearer and nearer to an impending death as the years pass by, especially when ageing causes a person to become frail and lose all faculties. While the speaker is primarily urging his father, but this poem is also an indirect plea to all those people who are nearing their death to cling firmly onto life and restore their dignity and power by fighting their inevitable fate, by raging “against the dying of the light.”
The speaker of this poem is also very anxious about how transient human life is. It bothers him that people are not able to do many things in the world just because they do not live long enough. The speaker even compares the short lifespan to the “flight” of the sun, which quickly flies out of sight soon after it appears. Thus, day and night, as well as the sunrise and the sunset, become extended metaphors throughout the poem. The day, the rising of the sun, represents life, which like the quick flight of the sun is very brief. “dying of the light” not only represents the light of day, but life itself, and the speaker constantly emphasizes that just like daylight, life itself can easily and inevitably slip away. Since the sun also symbolizes all that is amazing, beautiful and wonderful in the world, the authors urges not to let that light die, and to hold onto life.
There seem to be quite a few examples of figures of speech in this poem. The first three stanzas contain a single instance of alliteration (go, good; though, their; deeds, danced) while the fourth fifth stanza contains two (sang, sung; learn, late and see, sight; blinding, blind, blaze). The words age, rave, day and blaze, gay, rage in the first and fifth stanzas are assonances since the sound between their syllables seem to resemble. As mentioned, “good night” has been used in the poem as a metaphor for death, while the first line of the fourth stanza is a metaphor for triumphant achievement. In the fourth stanza, “forked no lighting” has been used as a metaphor to state that the words of “wise men” received no attention. The first, fifth and sixth stanzas of the poem also contains an oxymoron in the form of “good night,” “blinding sight,” and “fierce tears,” while the line “blind eyes could blaze like meteors” is a simile.
It is obvious that Dylan Thomas has written this poem in the form of the villanelle, which is supposed to six stanzas, the first five consisting of three lines and the last one consisting of four lines, making a total of nineteen lines. Like any other villanelle, Thomas’s poem has an intricate rhyme scheme, where the first and the third line are the refrains of the poem, since each line gets repeated four times throughout the poem. The poem has an ABA rhyme scheme for the first five stanzas and ABBA for the sixth stanza, so all the lines in the poem end with just two rhymes. The language that Dylan Thomas has used in this poem actually works against the complicated and strict villanelle form, but he follows it quite impressively, and manages to create a poem that is emotional and has quite an urgent feel.