Course performance
1) Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night – Dylan Thomas
2) A. The basic meaning of this poem is it’s all about old age and dying. The speaker states that old men at the ends of their lives should resist death as strong as possible. The will only leave this world if it was the last thing they had to do. The title was untitled for a long time; Thomas came up with the title just by looking at the first line of the poem. Line 1 is an extended metaphor that day represents life and night represents afterlife. In line 3 you will first notice the beginning of repetition that will continue throughout the whole poem. You will notice the intense imagery in the second stanza. The author uses a lot of parallelism in this poem. It starts from line6-15. You will notice that the author indicates the type of men and then describes the interesting facts about them. In the forth stanza the reader might notice the extended metaphor; the sun becomes a symbol. Lines 13-14 Represents paradox by mentioning the sense of sight. There’s an oxymoron in line 17. Thomas was asking his father to curse but also bless him. This poem is written in third person. The settings in this poem is a metaphorical descriptions of life, death and struggle. Some examples are; Lingering sunset to a bolt of lightning, Green bay from seashore to a shooting star and then to a mountain. This poem is written in a form called villanelle. A villanelle poem is a type of poem in which it has 19 lines divided into 5 3-lined stanza’s (6th stanza is 4 lines). It also has 10 syllables per line. The lines that are repeated are the lines that direct the whole poem, and the lines that are not repeated just kind of flush out those important lines. There is a Rhyming scheme in a villanelle. It is that every other line in the stanza will rhyme together and every middle line rhymes with the next stanza’s middle line.
B. A theme I chose for this piece to connect with another piece we did in class is old age. I chose this because it is a significant theme in both Do not go gentle into that good night, and King Lear.
Evidence from Do not go gentle into that good night is: “Do not go gentle into that good night, Old age should burn and rave at close of day; Rage, rage against the dying of the light.” Which means Thomas is trying to tell his father that don’t give up that easily, fight until the very end and don’t leave us until you really need to.
In King Lear it’s the complete opposite. Lear says “Meantime we shall express our darker purpose.- Give me the map there.- know that we have divided In three our kingdom, and ‘tis our fast intent To shake all cares and business from our age, Conferring them on younger