Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night By Dylan Thomas

In his famous poem “Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night”, Dylan Thomas writes about death; meanwhile, his own father is on his death bed from an illness. He speaks of many kinds of men, his father included, who all are bound to die. Yet throughout the many descriptions of dying men, there is one definitive similarity that draws together a conclusion. By analyzing the diction and structure, as well as the individual lines of Thomas’s poem the general identified theme is that no matter how people may live their lives, or what those people believe in, they all will fight to get away from the inevitable clutches of death. The poem itself is written in iambic pentameter and is classified as a villanelle. The stanzas are written as five tercets

The second lines of each stanza elaborate on the reasons that the varieties of men resist death. The second line reads, “Old age should burn and rave at close of day;” It means that the old should be celebrant and energetic when it is their time to pass, not gloomy and sickly like his father was. Line four in the poem states that “[t]hough wise men at their end know dark is right”. They know that it is right for them to die, but as their stanza ends, they “[d]o not go gentle into that good night”. The good men’s deeds in line eight “…might have danced in a green bay,” but they still do not matter, because they still resisted their death. The wild men “…learn, too late, they grieved it on its way” (11), stating that they have contributed to none other than themselves until they died, and they still try to resist. The grave men wielding “[b]lind eyes could blaze like meteors and be gay,” in line 14 are simply blissfully ignorant. It is about the blind dying people that cannot see, yet still are happy. If they are happy, then why do they “[r]age, rage against the dying of the light.”? They never got to see, they may have been happy, but they did not get to see disappointment either, they did not experience part of life that they wanted, and so, they fight death. In line 17 Thomas, speaking to his father, states “[c]urse, bless, me now with your fierce tears…” Thomas implies he is pained to see that his own father is dying,