Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night Figurative Language

“When you stop fighting, that’s death” (John Wayne). How does one survive when they give up and resign? Dylan Thomas, author of the poem “Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night”, explores a situation set with a man with his father on his deathbed, pleading for him to fight death and to “not go gentle”. Through lively and illustrative figurative language and a well-designed repetitive structure, Thomas depicts the excitement of life, but simultaneously acknowledges death, and urges one to fight against it until the end.

Thomas strengthens his thesis about fighting death through depictive figurative language and specific structural choices. Firstly, looking at specific comparisons, Thomas utilizes similes and metaphors to expose the meaning of

In these lines“, there lives a personification of “frail deeds”, saying that they might have “danced”. The phrase itself eludes to “good men” wanting to achieve more in the world, so they try to fight against death. And including this with good men emphasizes the speaker’s argument to his father, as he wants the father to relate to and sees his father as a good man. And tying back to the “blinding sight” tied to grave men, the phrase itself includes an oxymoron (Line 13). This phrase’s purpose exists as a way to amplify how even if people of old age have problems or can’t see, they still have joy, wisdom, and light. Thomas uses this phrase to highlight that“grave”, blind men still can “see” the light in the world. Furthermore, the use of imagery and illustrative diction creates a detailed picture of what the speaker describes. Most of the imagery used helps build on themes of life, light, heat, etc. We see diction throughout defining the speaker’s claim, with words like “burn”, “lightning”, “rage”, “blaze”, and “sun in flight” used to strengthen the themes of battling death and overcoming darkness. Most of the diction, similar to the words said before, amplifies the

The author used a villanelle poem structure, which consists of nineteen lines, with two repeating lines throughout. In this instance, we get the line “Rage, rage against the dying of the light,” (Lines 3, 9, 15, 19) and the line “Do not go gentle into that good night” (Lines 1, 6, 12, 18). Villanelles often get used for poems and works that have more broad themes, for example, life and death. They also deal with the natural world as well. Possibly, Thomas chose this particular structure because his themes deal with the natural world itself, as death plays a part in it. The structure in the poem itself does its job though, highlighting again and again, drawing back and resaying the speaker’s claim to his father. The repetition used for those lines signals a sense of fear and desperation from the speaker, praying that his father fights and doesn’t give up. The reader can feel the emotion grow as the lines get repeated again and again. It builds up to the climax of his father “on the sad height”, approaching death (Line 16). Thomas successfully flows the poem through the repetition in the two repeated lines, and it overall builds and grows the poem’s main message about death. With the structure chosen, we do see lots of patterns of repetition besides the main two lines repeated over and over. In stanzas two