Do Not Go Gently Into That Good Night- Dylan Thomas
...eated throughout the entire poem, and are paired together at the end. Thomas is stressing his father to endure and fight against death. He is also pleading the reader to prevent death to overcome and live life to the fullest until the very end. The way he repeats “rage, rage” can be thought of as a cheer of encouragement for his father not to give in. At the same time, it is his own rage over the inevitable death his father will undergo. “Good night” and “Dying of the Light” are both metaphors that refer to death. In the line, “Old age should burn and rave at close of day” (2), “burn and rave” means to fight against and “close of day” is yet another reference to death. The repetitions give the poem a forceful and predictable style with a fixed rhythm. There is a total of five tercet and a final quatrain, which is the form of a villanelle. The rhyme scheme is aba aba aba aba aba abaa. The meter for this poem is the famous iambic pentameter. Thomas uses examples of men with different personality traits to prove that people do not die gently. In the second stanza, “Though wise men at their end know dark is right” (4) is saying that the wise men know emptiness and nothingness awaits them after death. The following line continues “Because their works had forked no lightning they Do not go gentle into that good night”(5-6). This means that during their life, they spoke the truth so they do not die gently. In stanza three, the good men who have lived appropriate moral lives do not go gently to death because “their frail deeds might have danced in a green bay” (8). The writer is speaking that they are concerned about whether their deeds may not be good enough. Thus, they do not die gently. The fourth stanza represents the wild side of men, in which they “caught and sang the sun in flight” (10) is saying that they reached and sang for the heavens. However, line 11 implies that they learned they were too late, and so they did...