Death is an inevitable factor of life, which all humanity must ultimately face. What varies between people is how they handle this “coming of the end.” Some accept it with grace and calm, while others fight it until their last breath. Dylan Thomas is one such person who prefers the latter. In Thomas's "Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night," the speaker uses repetition and imagery to juxtapose light with night in an attempt to encourage his father not to give in to weakness near the end of his life. plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get an Original Essay Thomas's speaker feels it is necessary to point out to his father the importance of "Anger, anger against the dying of the light" (Thomas 93). Every other stanza ends with this line, where he encourages his father to fight against the "death of light", to fight against this darkening of life, against death and aging. This repetition places greater emphasis on the sentence, constantly reminding the reader, or the speaker's father, of its main message. Against all this dying "the father must be furious, and in doing so he separates himself from it" (Westphal 2). He can separate himself from this weakness and submission to death. This is what the son pleads. He punctuates the stanzas with this verse as a final reminder to fight and resist the coming weakness. The speaker alternates the repetition of “Anger, anger against the dying of the light” with “Do not go gentle into that good night.” Every other stanza ends with this line, which serves as a further reminder to his father and the reader. Just as the other line encourages one to fight against the weakness of death and aging, this line warns him not to give up easily and not to be “gentle” in approaching death. The first five stanzas all end with one of these two, and the final stanza contains both. The importance of the two lines could not be clearer. The rhyme scheme also repeats with ABA, the rhyme always coming back to “light” and “night” so that their importance is even clearer. The speaker “advocates active resistance to death immediately before death.” This repetition almost seems like he is begging, even begging his father to resist, to “burn and rave” instead (Thomas 93). The speaker also uses his repetition to talk about other men, “wise men…good men. …wild men…grave men” all come to the same seemingly pleasant fate of death, yet they enter it having learned “too late, they grieved [the sun]” (Thomas 93). The sun is the symbol of their life, these men believed they were celebrating life, but when they died they realized that it was too late, death was upon them and they could do nothing. Instead of this pleasant acceptance of the end of a life they thought was fulfilled, there is the feeling of doom that it is over. As Daiches suggests of Thomas' poem, there is this “note of doom in the midst of present pleasure, for hidden in every moment lies change and death” (Daiches 3). These men are all experiencing this hidden change, they knew death was coming, but for them it changed, it turned against them. They serve as examples of what the speaker wants the father to avoid. At the end of the two repeated lines of the poem are the words "night" and "light" which in themselves require special attention from the reader. In this poem "night" becomes synonymous with dying just as "light" becomes synonymous with living. The speaker refers to death as “that good night” as well as a “dying of the light” (Thomas 93). Thomas uses these two concepts to create his images.
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