Light, Life, Meaning

Our world is a dark, brutal place. Without the human race, earth is a land ruled by animals, driven by instinct, overrun with violence, and focused on survival regardless of morality. The human race, in contrast, has the potential to bring warmth and light into this life through the strength and perseverance found in it’s fight for meaningful survival. This phenomenon, however, is only possible through individual participation in contribution to humanity’s betterment. It is imperative that humanity has the individual incentive to give life meaning by means of it’s actions and words. Through the use of light and dark metaphors, Dylan Thomas’s “Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night” juxtaposes the “light” created by humanity against the “dark” of an otherwise empty world to demonstrate the importance of individual contribution to the human experience. Thomas illustrates that the refusal to resign one's potential for greatness is a critical aspect in humanity’s contribution to the “light” that gives meaning to life.

Thomas employs an extended metaphor of night and day throughout this work to establish a connection between human life and light, while consequently linking absence of humanity to darkness. The text refers to death as a “good night,” implying the necessity of death, while also establishing “night” as a term synonymous with death for the remainder of the poem. However, it also declares not to go to it gently, calling on men to “burn” and “rage” against the end of life, both being associated to fire, the origin of all light (burn being the effect of fire and rage being an emotion connected to heat and redness in the face). This word choice is a declarative reference to that association, announcing that through the burnin...

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...e meteors,” an illustration of the potential actions of these men as something that would “blaze” again referring to the potential of every man to create “light” in his lifetime. The failure of these men to create this light is what led them to live blindly, forced to deal with the darkness of an earth without human light.(11-12)

Thomas Dylan’s “Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night” illustrates, through its prevalent dark vs. light metaphors, the absolute necessity of individual responsibility in the effort to retain the accomplishment humanity has reached in its “light”. The refusal to resign to death is a critical aspect of the greatness that has allowed humanity to create a habitable earth out of a land so naturally filled with darkness. Without this light, our world can only revert to its natural state, a state of ferocity, instinct, violence, and immorality.