Because I Could Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night Comparison

After looking through all the poems assigned over the past few weeks, Emily Dickinson’s poem, “Because I could not stop for Death,” and Dylan Thomas’ poem, “Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night,” both contain similarities and differences. Dickinson wrote her poem in 1863, while Thomas did not write his poem until 1947. Despite the age differences, both poems contain a similar topic, but they both portray it differently by using different poetic devices. To begin with, Emily Dickinson’s poem, “Because I could not stop for Death,” and Dylan Thomas’ poem, “Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night,” share the same topic of death being inevitable, but portray differing views when it comes to a person who meets death. For example, in the poem, “Because

This means that the lines are composed of feet with two syllables in an unstressed pattern and alternate between tetrameter and trimeter. An iambic meter is best shown in the third stanza where the speaker states, “We passed the School, where Children strove / At Recess in the Ring” (Dickinson lines 9-10). In addition, Dickinson did not follow a specific rhyme scheme and even used a few slant rhymes. This loose structure affects the overall meaning of the poem by giving readers the effect of going on the journey without any restrictions. Unlike Dickinson, Thomas uses a very strict form known as the villanelle. A villanelle poem consists of a total of nineteen lines that are divided into five tercets and one quatrain. The textbook, The Norton Introduction to Literature, states, “The first and third lines of the first tercet rhyme with each other, and this rhyme is repeated through each of the next four tercets and in the last two lines of the concluding quatrain” (Mays 977). This rhyme pattern can be seen when the speaker says, “Do not go gentle into that good night / Old age should burn and rave at close of day / Rage, rage against the dying of the light” (Thomas lines