Analysis Of The Poem That Good Night By Edward Thomas

Throughout the poem, Thomas uses imagery and metaphors to parallel life and death with nature. In the first stanza, Thomas uses an extended metaphor that relates “that good night” (1) to the afterlife, and explains how people should “burn and rave at close of day” (2) before struggling against “the dying of the light” (3). Thomas explains how people should live passionately during their lifetime, represented as the day, before their death, which is depicted as a sunset. This comparison of day and night to life and death illustrates to the reader how one’s lifetime can be fleeting, and how the speaker urges to live vehemently for as long as you can before dying. Thomas additionally uses nature imagery when he describes how men, although aware of the irrevocability of death, fight against their demise

In the last stanza, Thomas addresses his dying father and asks him to “curse [and] bless [him] with [his] fierce tears” (17). Thomas finally uses first person in line 17 which demonstrates to the reader his connection to the theme. The passionate familial bonds in the poem between the speaker and his father explain the meaning of the poem and why Thomas is desperately telling elders to fight when they are on the verge of death. Thomas asks his father to cry fiercely before he dies because he wants him to use all of his energy to stay alive for as long as he can rather than going down peacefully. The last stanza reveals to the readers that the views reflected throughout the poem are a result of Thomas’s distress due to his dying father. This deepens the meaning of the poem and expresses how the incoming loss of a loved one causes people to strongly hope for an alternative, just as Thomas encourages people like his father to fight against death. The last stanza explains how Thomas urges the dying to keep struggling despite knowing death is unavoidable because he does not wish to lose his