Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night Dylan Thomas

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The two poems that will be analysed in this essay are Stop All the Clocks, Cut off the Telephone by W.H. Auden and Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night by Dylan Thomas, and each poet captures the essence of death and how it effects the author’s. The structure is very similar because they both use Villanelle, which is typically written with 19 lines, two repeating rhymes and two refrains. The first line of Dylan Thomas’s Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night talks about resisting death. “Rage, rage against the dying of the light” talks about raging against the light going out of their life. In Stop All the Clocks, Cut off the Telephone it starts off in a calm tone also. “Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone, prevent the dog from barking…show more content…
In Do Not Go Gentle into that Good Night, Thomas wrote, “Their frail deeds might have danced in a green bay”; this is a good example of imagery because it shows that the ‘green bay’ is full of life, algae, seaweed etc. Thomas describes potential actions which can’t be done because they must die as “frail deeds”, this is very powerful as it describes the men as helpless earlier on in the poem yet he wants them to rage against the “dying of the light”. “Who caught and sang the sun in flight” this particular line represents those who apprehend reality around them and embrace it. Thomas uses the sun to represent the elegance of reality, and it’s “flight” refers to the lifetime of those who are living. The use of repetition in the poem, “Rage, rage against the dying of the light” is made to emphasize the importance of dying peacefully and “going gently”. In the last verse of the poem we begin to realise who the poem is directed for and in fact it is his father, “And you, my father, there on that sad height”, the author refers “sad height” as on the verge of death. Thomas ends the poem with two lines that are repeated all through the poem, asking his father to not die, but to fight against it. This poem portrays that although death is inevitable, we must whatever must be done to stay…show more content…
The first stanza includes harsh commands, “Stop all the clocks, cut of the telephone, prevent the dog from barking with a juicy bone, silence the pianos and with muffled drum, bring out the coffin, let the mourners come”. These imperatives represent time, and the author wants everything to stop. The second stanza is a little bit different as Auden writes, “Let aeroplanes circle the mourning overhead”. So in the first line he was asking for silence and now he is making things more public when he says, “scribbling on the sky the message He Is Dead”. So there is a mixture of public and private acknowledgments of the recently passed. As the poem progresses the author talks about how the deceased gave him direction when Dylan wrote, “He was my North, my South, my East and West”. And follows that line is, “my working week and my Sunday rest”, which represents that this person filled his days and time. So now it is becoming clearer that who this poem is directed at, was a very close friend or family member to the author. This is a little bit similar to Funeral Blues as we do not know who the poems are written for until the last stanza. But they both give hints along the way. “My noon, my midnight, my talk, my song” is saying that this particular person is someone who was a part of his daily life. And in Do Not Go Gentle into that Good Night, “And you my father,
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