Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night Poem Analysis

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Dylan Thomas’s poem “Do Not Go Gentle into that Good Night” explores inevitable mortality and what happens when death finally comes for a person. Throughout the villanelle structure, the speaker leads the reader through pleas of fighting against “that good night” and provides examples of all the men that have fought against it, and how those men lived their lives before facing their deaths. The repeated refrains throughout the poem help to reinforce the ideas of not going “gentle” and “raging against” the dying light, instituting the idea of protesting against death, for it is not something to succumb to. Not only does this poem explore how to face the inevitable, but Thomas also explores how a life should be lived. “Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night” illuminates the relationship between …show more content…

Life is something to appreciate in full, no matter how “wild” something seems it should happen because of the shortness of “flight” that is mortality. This stanza ends with the “do not go gentle” refrain, illuminating the fact that the “wild men” are not going gentle into death. The “wild men” are described as the ones who are not allowing themselves to fade quietly into death, which is what the speaker desperately wishes his father would do. As the poem’s end draws near, the speaker’s pleas get more and more desperate for his father to fight against death, because the end of the poem symbolizes the end of his father’s fight. The speaker describes the “wild men” as ones who “sang the sun in flight,” meaning these men were the ones who appreciated the beauty and took advantage of what the entire world has to offer in the blink of an eye lifespan people are given to leave their mark. These wild men learn with old age that their lives of wild adventures slowly begin to dissolve as they and their friends start to lose the light, which is what is happening to the speaker’s

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