do not go gentle into that goodnight by dylan thomas Essay -- essays r

Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night - Dylan Thomas [1914-1953] Relevant Background Dylan Thomas was born at home in Swansea, Wales in 1914. His parents were middle class. His father was a schoolmaster in English at the local grammar school. Dylan Thomas was anxious in himself as a child and sometimes unwell. He was often absent from school and dropped out at sixteen. He preferred to read on his own. He did very well in English and reading, but neglected other subjects. As a poet it is clear that Dylan Thomas enjoyed playing with language. ‘Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night’ is an emotional and touching appeal to his dying father not to die. Though Dylan’s father was an English teacher, he didn’t like his job. However, Dylan was always grateful to his father for giving him a love of literature. Thomas feared, respected, and deeply loved his father. His father had been ill a long time without realising that he was dying. Thus he couldn’t show his father this emotional poem. Dylan Thomas spoke this poem to his father in his mind, but not in real life. The poem is a villanelle. A villanelle is made up of five stanzas of three lines followed by a final stanza of four lines. See the note on ‘Form’ below. It is normal for two of the lines to be repeated in a pattern throughout the poem. So even though it is a nineteen-line poem, there are only thirteen individual lines of poetry to understand. Dylan Thomas’ poetry is known for its vivid and often fantastic imagery. He drank himself to death in a drinking session in New York City in 1953. Summary In the first stanza or tercet the poet urges his very ill father to fight his illness. It is expressing a hope rather than an actual command because his father never heard the poem. Dylan Thomas declares that even in old age the old should violently resist their death. The poet urges his father to angrily hold on to his life. In the second stanza, Thomas states that wise men may know that death is natural but they too resist death violently. They hold on because they realise they have not made a sufficient impact on society with their wisdom. In the third stanza, Thomas states that honest men don’t accept their death because they want to live on to give more good example to others. In the fourth stanza, Thomas states that men who lived mad and wild lives don’t give in at the end. Thomas d... ... sounds to emphasise anger and fighting in ‘Rage, Rage, against’. Notice the use of long ‘i’ sounds in the remainder of the line to express sadness ‘dying of the light’. Sibilance [repetition of ‘s’ sound] The four ‘s’ sounds in ‘Curse, bless me now with your fierce tears’ create music and a mixture of tender and angry feelings. Form It is an elaborately structured villanelle. A villanelle is made up of five stanzas of three lines [tercets] followed by a quatrain, a unit of four lines of poetry. The opening line of the poem, the first line in the first stanza, also ends the second and fourth tercets. The third and final line of the first tercet ends the third and fifth tercet as well as the quatrain at the end of the poem. Rhyme There are just two end sounds shared by all the lines in the poem: ‘ight’ and ‘ay’. The poem follows the strict rhyme scheme of the villanelle. The first and third lines of each of the three-line stanzas rhyme with the same end sound for all those stanzas. The second line of all the stanzas rhyme. In the four-line stanza the first line rhymes with the third and the fourth line. ‘Go’ and ‘good’ as well as ‘rage, rage’ create music through internal rhyme.