Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night, By Dylan Thomas

Loss is a subject that most of us are likely familiar with at this point in our lives. Though it varies depending on the person and who is being lost, we normally don’t want them to go. Dylan Thomas catches this kind of sentiment perfectly in his poem Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night which was written about his dying father. He challenges the traditional villanelle poetic form, normally used for ballads which are, more often than not, about love, and shows his grief instead. Though grief and many other negative emotions are touched upon in the poem, I believe the overarching theme is that one cannot simply accept death quietly, they, instead, must fight it. This theme is shown and supported through the use of imagery, symbolism, and literary

Two that stood out to me while reading are repetition and parallel story. Repetition is very obvious in the poem with the repeated lines being “do not go gentle into that good night” and “rage, rage against the dying of light”, with each line being repeated interchangeably at the end of each stanza until the last one where both are repeated. Both of these lines convey the theme very clearly. Both lines are pretty straightforward in their meaning, “do not go gentle into that good night” could be quite literally translated to “do not die quietly” while “rage, rage against the dying of light” translates to “fight at the end of your life, fight death.” While the meanings of the sentences are direct, I feel the use of repetition also supports the theme. By repeating these two lines a great emphasis is put on them and their meaning, Thomas is telling us and telling us and telling us to do these things, to not go quietly, to rage, that if we must die we have to go out swinging, etcetera, etcetera. By using repetition, Thomas reiterates and really drives home the theme which is to “not go gentle”, to “rage, rage”, to stay alive. There is, also, the use of parallel stories in this poem. The way parallel stories are used is by recreating the same context, an old man close to death, but with a different kind of man every time. In this poem we encounter “wise men”, “good men”, “wild men”, and “grave men”. Each type of man reacts to his seemingly impending doom differently, but all of them do end their three-line story by deciding to fight against death, which is exactly our theme here. The use of parallel stories is to show the readers and the subject that any kind of person can turn their back on death, can grab at life and chose to try and continue living. Repetition is used to drive the point home on a personal level, parallel stories is used to show the effectiveness of the theme