Do Not Go Gentle into that Good Night by Dylan Thomas (Research Paper Sample)

Student’s Name
Professor’s Name
Course
Date
“Do Not Go Gentle into that Good Night” by Dylan Thomas
It is a fact of science as well as the social life that all that lives must come to the sad and brutal reality of death. “Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night”, is a poem by Dylan Thomas presenting the plea of a son to his dying father. The poem confronts the complex yet the mandatory subject of ‘death’ that is the ultimate end of everything that lives. The poet purposes to illustrate the fact that all men can go through the same circumstances ending up on in the same way. He acknowledges that men must fight for life and for the things in which they believe. Thomas uses the different categories to deny his father the excuses in spite of what he did in life. Although death is part of life, the speaker of the poem believes people should resist death as actively as they can no matter the stage of their lives and even when one is on the edge of dying, he or she still should not give in to death.
The poet employs the use of darkness of the night as a metaphor epitomizing the brutality of death whereas the light of day represents a person’s lifetime. The poem presents imagery through sensual experience (Guo and Wang 127). The second line of the poem is an epitome for the entire poem and seeks to speak to the mind of the reader. The poem begins by highlighting the essentiality in the wisdom of the wise men. In the first stanza of the poem, the poet describes the wise men by saying that although old men are filled with wisdom; they chose to lose the fight to death because they know it is better to die than to strive to live (Thomas 116). The first part entails the description in the sense that states that the men are few. Thomas believes that his father is still a good man and that the world can use him to make amends with the rest of his community. The phrase “crying how bright” shows how the men are interested in keeping their hopes alive and in telling stories about their legacies to the younger generation. They endeavor to proclaim their work as excellent and worth emulating (The Guardian-Editorial).
Contrary to the idea that wise men change their minds about the role of darkness in their lives, they only come to terms with the idea that death is a natural part of life. Old men realize early in life that death is inevitable. They cannot do anything about it except accepting it as part of lifeCITATION Dyl53 \l 1033 (Poets.org). The poem suggests that taking death is a sign of wisdom and not weakness. The next line in the poem seems to find reason in the wordings of the previous line. The line reasons that old people refrain from fighting against death because they feel inadequate in gaining sufficient notoriety or repute. The line says, “Because their words had forked no lighting” (Thomas 116). The poet uses the words to mean it is their way of holding on to life to be able to leave a legacy. They seek to sustain their memory in history as great philosophers or scholars.
Wise people know they are going to die, they should not merely accept it, because they have not made much of a mark on the world. The poet advances in describing the next group as the ‘good men’ (Freeman 1). The goodness of the men reflects on their lives as the end approaches. The essence of their morality is illustrated in the next line of the poem, “Good men, the last wave by, crying how bright” (Thomas 116). Comprehension of the line can be broken down into two parts. The play describes men who know that their deeds will remember in spite of their seemingly essential attainments. The remembrance of their deeds occurs in spite of their good deeds. At the culmination of his reflection about the past, the poet refers to green bay by way of marking a place in history. The old men make a determination to live for something and have their names down the books of history.
“Do not Go Gentle into That Night” is written in a specific form, which is Villanelle (Spacey). The wild men of the poem discover late that they are mortal. Learning about their immortality elevates them to another level of understanding. The men spend their time, lives in action, and only come to the realization that their time has run out at the end of their journey. The poet makes an exaggeratory remark about the lives and experiences of the old men and how they spend their days chasing things they cannot catch. The poem laments not only the inevitable nature and the necessity of death, but it also encourages the old to rebel against their fateCITATION Mar18 \l 1033 (Popova). The poem suggests that men ought to leave the world the same way they came into it, screaming and kicking and holding on to life for all its worth. The poet signifies the need to fight for what one believes in no matter what it takes.
For people who are close to death, they still have a choice on how to spend the remainder of their lives. The poem refers to the manner in which the old men lived their lives in the line “caught and sang the sun” (Sederer). The men lived their lives as daredevils who face perilous situations with plenty of ignorance. The old men are consumed by adventure and excitement upon which they waste their entire lives. The poet writes about the same situation by saying that the men realize when it is very late and they are forced to grieve it on its way (Thomas 116). The line refers to the realization of the men about their state of mortality. The men in the poem are pushed to grief by the manner in which they have lived most of their lives in carelessness and folly. As the end fast approaches, the old men are forced to hold fast to the memories of the adventures of their youth because they desire more time to make a legacy to precede their names. They aspire to correct some of the mistakes they have made in the course of their lives.
The poem offers a description about the grave men as the last groups of men in the world. The persona illustrates the fact that they are near the point of death, seeing with the blinding sight. The use of the term ‘grave men’ in the poem signifies two different meanings. The term refers to men who are saddened by the thought of being near their point of death. The men feel the strains of the long life and the thought of starting to decay. The eyes of the old men drop along with the rest of the bodyCITATION Mar18 \l 1033 (Popova). Despite the fact that their eyes are dropping along with the rest of the body, they still burn with a passion for the love of life within them. The poet describes the eyes as being in a frail state. He says that blind eyes could be like meteors and gay at the same time (Thomas 116). The line is an expression of the present state of the struggle men put forth for the sake of survival. The poet offers the insight in his belief that his father would have loved to live longer even in his frail state.
The meaning of life is a quite vague idea; not an exact answer would be appropriate for everyone. The poet alters his reference to the old men to represent the uncertainty in his mind and the minds of the men as wellCITATION Dyl53 \l 1033 (Poets.org). At the start of the play, Thomas refers to the old men as wise men, and then he calls them the good men then finally the wild men. At the end of the poem, he refers to them as the grave men. The reason the poet use the gradual progression in his description of the men is that he tries to establish where the character of his father liesCITATION Gua14 \l 1033 (The Guardian-Editorial). The poet slowly moves into describing what he thinks his father resigned into becoming. Before turning into the man, that he finally becomes the father of the poet begins as a man in the military. The poet is bothered by the resignation of his father into his current state of resignation. The poet suggests that all men ought to make their mark in the world, yet his father has not done so.
The application of imagery and metaphorical language can provide a more explicit relationship in the poem. The persona in the poem tries to prevent the inevitable by pleading for more time. He feels and can see the desperation in his father’s eyes. He believes that being to prove to his father that no one gives up easily despite his or her disposition will get him out of his deathbed. The poem culminates at the point where he makes a desperate but passionate plea to his father in the expression, “Do not go gentle into that good night” (Thomas 116). The plea forms the primary subject of the poem and signifies the poet’s attempt to keep his dying father from dying. Referring to death as “that good night” means that the poet knows that death is a healthy part of life (Thomas 116). Aside from the standard cliché bedeviling of death and comparison to ghastly events in life the poet uses the term ‘good’ in describing death to show acceptance of the fate for the human race.
The persona in the poem urges his father to fight against a calm end and try to resist the advances of death. A section of the poem looks like a note of good light. The poet suggests that old age ought to rave and burn at the end of the day (Thomas 116). The line suggests that old age needs to be done away with in the same manner as other aspects of life. In doing so, the poet suggests that life would be better without death. The personal almost suggests that old people need to be allowed to live long, albeit in complaint provided they do not despair. The value of the decision of the poet to use division remains for the emphasis on the significance of life. He leaves hi...