Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night Essay

The opening lines to Dylan Thomas’s “Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night” 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 much more complex piece on death. Dylan 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 Dylan Thomas’s villanelle is a command that shares the same name as the poem itself, “Do not go gentle into that good night.” Throughout the poem, Thomas uses the …show more content…
When Thomas writes, “Old age should burn and rave at close of day,” is his way of saying that death should not be given in to without a fight. Thomas’s choice of two similar words in “rage” and “rave” connotes a certain lack of control and almost irrational resistance to what comes to everyone. That being said, Thomas argues that resisting is preferable to that of simply waiting for death to come. Written for his father, Thomas’s opening stanza is a beautiful opening to the poem. He, in much more elegant terms, writes that one might as well spit in death’s face and live a full life rather than sit back and …show more content…
Wishing for his father to not give in to the cold hands of death, Thomas builds a beautifully rhythmic plea with his use of light and dark images, his use of diction, and his use of anaphora. Each of these poetic devices is used by Thomas to elevate his writing and to elegantly illustrate the deep love he feels for his father. Though a sad poem, it is not necessarily defeated. Throughout the poem, the narrator is able to remain hopeful in the notion that his father still has the ability to end his life on a defiant