Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night And Elegy Written In A Country Churchyard By Thomas Gray Analysis

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Since the beginning of the world, every human being has questioned his or her place in the world and what he or she can be able to achieve. “Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night” by Dylan Thomas and “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard” by Thomas Gray are two poems that transmit the same message. The two poems convey the importance of life’s meaning and transience; however, the methods the authors use to convey this are distinctive.
The poem “Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night” describes how one should fight death till the very end and live fully as long as one is alive. In the first stanza one can see that death is something that even the elderly should not take slightly. “Old age should burn and rave at close of day; Rage, rage against
Gray explains how after a man is dead his memory dies with him. “For them no more the blazing hearth shall burn, / Or busy housewife ply her evening care; / No children run to lisp their sire’s return, / Or climb his knees the envied kiss to share” (Gray 21-24). Gray is trying to say that these poor men in the graveyard are not going to enjoy the simple pleasures that they had when they were alive and that their families have moved on and forgotten them as the years have passed. No one expresses the importance that a person had or still has in his or her life after that person is dead and Gray expresses this as a rhetorical question. “For who to dumb forgetfulness a prey, / This pleasing anxious being e’er resigned, / Left the warm precincts of the cheerful day, / Nor cast one longing ling’ring look behind (Gray 85-88). What this is saying is that no one is going to look back or spent his or her time remembering and keeping alive the memory of those who are now resting in the graveyard. “They are largely forgotten, the speaker argues, but they should not be- for everyone deserves to be remembered and mourned by someone” (Elegy written in a Country

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