Do Not Go Gentle Into That Goodnight By Dylan Thomas Analysis

Dylan Thomas is another poet that has written a poem about loss. However, in ‘Do Not Go Gentle Into That Goodnight’, the poets father is ageing and dying slowly and he is struggling to accept it, the persona is begging his father to fight for his life, to live longer and to not give up, the persona is determined to make his father win the battle against the natural order of things, Dylan Thomas wrote this poem with intentions to motivate his father to keep fighting, the persona is portrayed as someone that does not handle losing someone well, from the first stanza you can already sense the desperation in the words used.

The use of the word ‘goodnight’ is like a goodbye to his dying father as the ‘night’ symbolises death, the end so to say ‘goodnight’

In this stanza is the first time he addresses who the poem is aimed at ‘and you, my father’ so until you read the whole poem you don 't know who its about. I have decided to compare this poem to ‘Funeral Blues’ as there are many similarities, the poet is struggling to accept the loss of someone that means a lot to them in their hearts and they have both turned their sadness into anger in some ways and desperation in others. This is similar to the reaction of the poet ‘W.H Auden’ when he wrote ‘Funeral Blues’, this poem portrays grief in a way that if you haven 't experienced it, this poem will make you feel the overwhelming pain that the writer was experiencing when he was mourning the loss of his

This poem is about a mother holding her dying son in her weak arms before she buries him, it paints a picture of an un-natural death that gives you a new image of life. The poem describes how the mother is trying to cope the pain she is in and the circumstances and surroundings make the poem even more depressing, she is faking a smile ‘ghost smile’ to overcome her sadness to the loss of her baby. It seems that she’s recently been in a natural disaster or a war and sought shelter in a refugee camp with her dying son, the poem is written in free verse, there is no rhyme scheme and the length of the stanzas are inconsistent. There is a religious reference included in the first line that symbolises Mary and Jesus, sibilance is also used throughout the poem. I think that the reason the last word is ‘grave’ because that is surely the end which ends the poem with horrible closure, however, the flowers give a somewhat positive image. The vocabulary used to describe the situation she is in are words such as ‘odours, diarrhoea, unwashed children, blown empty bellies, washed out, dried up’ all give an unhygienic image of the conditions of this refugee