An Explication of Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night :: Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night

Introductory Paragraph Dylan Thomass villanelle Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night is address to his aged flummox. The rime is remarkable in a number of ways, near notably in that contrary to most common poetic treatments of the inevitability of death, which beg for serenity or celebrate the peace that death provides, this poem urges resistance and rage in the face of death. It justifies that unusual attitude by describing the rage and resistance to death of four kinds of men, all of whom can summon up the image of a complete and satisfying purport that is denied to them by death. First corpse paragraph The first tercet of the intricately rhyming villanelle opens with an arresting argumentation. The adjective promiscuous appears where we would expect the adverb gently. The strange diction suggests that gentle may describe both the going (i.e., gently dying) and the person (i.e., gentleman) who confronts death. Further, the talker characterizes night, here clearly a figu re for death, as good. Yet in the next line, the speaker urge that the aged should violently resist death, characterized as the close of day and the dying of the light. In effect, the first three lines argue that however good death may be, the aged should refuse to reveal gently, should passionately rave and rage against death. The randomness body paragraph describes the second tercet. The third body paragraph the good men The fourth body paragraph the wild men The fifth body paragraph the rotund men Concluding paragraph The speaker then calls upon his aged pay back to join these men raging against death. Only in this final stanza do we discover that the entire poem is addressed to the speakers father and that, despite the generalized statements about old age and the focus upon types of men, the poem is a personal lyric. The edge of death becomes a sad height, the cap of wisdom and experience old age attains includes the sad knowledge of lifes failure to satisfy the vision w e all pursue. The depth and complexness of the speakers sadness is startlingly given the second line when he calls upon his father to both curse nd bless him. These opposites lavishly suggest several related possibilities.