Throughout the poem, the speaker dissuades those facing death from succumbing without a fight, an effort evoked predominantly by the speaker’s repeated plea that they should “rage, rage against the dying of the light.” All the while, the speaker acknowledges that death is unavoidable. The poem comprises six stanzas in which the speaker categorizes men into four classes: wise men, good men, wild men, and grave men, with the intention of offering the reader a peek into the minds of such men as they near death. “Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night” takes its name from its opening sentence, which suggests that people should not go willingly to death or “gentle into that good night,” in other words. Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night Summary In a broader sense, the poem celebrates the vivacity and joy of human life despite its fleetingness. Dedicated to his father, the poem is considered a son’s plea to his dying father to maintain a zeal for life in the face of death. He is the author of, among others, The Secret Library: A Book-Lovers’ Journey Through Curiosities of History and The Great War, The Waste Land and the Modernist Long Poem.Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night” is a 1951 poem by Welsh poet Dylan Thomas. The author of this article, Dr Oliver Tearle, is a literary critic and lecturer in English at Loughborough University. And perhaps these words of analysis have shed a little light on the workings of the poem, and how it manages to produce such a powerful incantatory effect. You can hear Dylan Thomas reading ‘Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night’ here. The rhymes, too, cleverly reflect Thomas’s desire that his father allow a little daylight into his darkest final hours: ‘night’ plays off ‘light’ in terms of rhyme and meaning, but ‘day’, sandwiched between them, semantically opposes ‘night’ (just as Thomas’s father is being asked to oppose its oppressions) before giving way to ‘light’.
Such emphatic words convey the disordered rage which Thomas wants his father to allow to overcome him. ‘Rage, rage’ offers a nice example of the spondee (or heavy iamb, depending on your perspective on spondees), where two syllables are sounded with a similar amount of emphasis. It is that first stanza which shows Dylan Thomas’s way with vowels (and, for that matter, consonants) so wonderfully: ‘age’ and ‘rave’ play against each other with their long ‘a’ sounds, only to coalesce into ‘rage’ in the next line – decidedly apt, since the rage Thomas describes is a result of old age and, in Philip Larkin’s words, ‘the only end of age’. This shifts the poem between the two modes, between asking his father to put up one last fight against the terror of death, and talking of how ‘wise men’ and ‘wild men’ (among others) have provided an example to follow by their defiant actions, using their last breaths to contest their own annihilation.
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