Themes Of Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night

Themes are often expressed by poets through voice and tone. These elements play a major role in the overall outcome of how successful the poet is at revealing the theme he or she is trying to convey. For instance Dylan Thomas’ ‘Do Not Go Gentle into that Good Night’, is in third person narrative, giving a general idea of what ‘old age should’ do to ‘wise men’ , ‘good men’, ‘wild men’ and ‘grave men.’ However, towards the end of the poem, it changes into second person and Thomas starts to address his own father by saying ‘And you, my father.’ Using second person within the final stanza creates a deeper effect on the reader and becomes more personal as Thomas is speaking about his own father. Similarly, although the narrator of the poem isn’t …show more content…
Language used to express human suffering differs between poets. Poets also tend to express suffering or different types of people in order to create a deeper and more effective connection between the poem and reader. Chinua Achebe, in ‘Mother in a Refugee Camp’ for example, uses the physical desperate image of the ‘unwashed children with washed-out ribs… [with] blown-empty bellies’ to effectively represent the suffering that the mother and child are going through in the refugee camp. The alliteration in ‘blown…bellies’ intensifies the hardships and starvation that the children are going through, and the repetition of the word ‘washed’ in ‘unwashed children’ and ‘washed-out ribs’ emphasizes how dirty the children are and how much they have to undergo. Moreover, the poem only explores the suffering of one side of man; the victims (refugees). It uses the image of ‘No Madonna and Child’ referring to Jesus Christ and his mother. The use of the word ‘No’ suggests that not even prayer can help the child, whose mother ‘would soon have to forget’ after having died of starvation and suffering in the refugee camp during the Biafran War. Achebe also describes the suffering of the child to create an emotional connection with the reader by describing the ‘rust-colored hair left on his skull.’ The use of the adjective and metaphor ‘rust-colored’ suggests that the child …show more content…
The form and rhyme scheme of ‘Do Not Go Gentle into that Good Night’ (strict, regular and controlled) juxtaposes the complex message behind it; how even though everyone knows that death is inevitable, they should fight against it. The refrains are both used in the last stanza, with full-stops at the end of each, forming a rhyming couplet to emphasize that that stanza contains the main message of the poem; how important it is for him that his father continues to ‘rage against’ death. The rhyme scheme is traditional, and each stanza features two quatrains of rhymed iambic pentameter with several spondaic substitutions. Similarly, ‘War Photographer’ also has a strict form, structure and rhyme scheme; abbcdd. The stanzas are conventional (rhymed iambic lines) and each one ends with a couplet, as if to conclude an argument. The constricted rhyme scheme juxtaposes the theme of the poem; suffering is an abstract, and should not be neatly controlled. Moreover, the fact that the form is unchanging, and the stanzas are all the same length and the rhyme scheme is constant indicates that despite the photographer’s efforts, nothing will change; the poem is circular, a closed loop where nothing can change. Duffy also uses full-stops, at the end of each ‘Belfast. Beirut. Phnom Penh.’ to convey the message that although death is inevitable and life ends everywhere, in