Juan Huerta

Period: 5

Date: 2/12/19

Mr. Oh

Expository Analysis: “Do not go gentle into that good night”

Dylan Thomas’ “Do not go gentle into that good night” is a dejected poem

where the speaker’s emotions’ and feelings’ are despairing as his father's time is running out.

The speaker uses repetition, metaphors, alliteration, and other literary devices to attribute his

attitude concerning his father’s condition. The speaker wanted to inform the reader to fully

understand to not give up, even when being confronted by death. His sentiments regarding the

condition of his father disturb the speaker on how easily his father is accepting death. He hoped

his father would put up a fight than being benign about the situation.

The speaker uses multiple literary devices to communicate to the audience how he feels.

By using repetition, the speaker evinced his feelings about his father’s illness by having

identically lines. The lines altering at the end of every stanza are, “Do not go gentle into that

good night.” and “Rage, rage against the dying of the light.”. Dylan Thomas uses repetition to

stress the significance of the lines used and how this helps enhance the poem. These lines are

used to give how the speaker’s self feels about death and how he differs from what his father is

doing.
 Every stanza contains metaphors within every line having its own meaning. The

metaphors that the speaker used in this poem is important because it allows the reader to have a

better understanding of the poem and what he feels about his father. The lines that contain

metaphors talk about life and death. “Good night”, “Close of day”, and “The sun in flight” are

metaphors used in the stanzas. “Night” is portrayed as death because, at night time, people say

goodnight when they’re going to sleep and falling asleep feels as if you died. Also, when you put

an animal to “sleep” it means death. “Close of day” is also the end to life. When the day is done,

night time comes and that’s when the journey ends. It means that it's to a point where the day

doesn't come anymore. “The sun in flight” is an extended metaphor. The speaker used metaphors

to let the readers understand that death could be represented in different ways, but also to let his

father know to not die so easily.

The speaker uses alliteration as one of his literary devices. Not only does Thomas use

alliteration, but he also manages to oppose the words. The way alliteration is used in stanza 5 is

remarkable. It has such importance to the poem. The following lines are,

“Grave men, near death, who see with blinding sight

Blind eyes could blaze like meteors and be gay.”.

This means that even near death and being unable to see, grave men will still fight against death

because they know not to go out so easily. It's significant because it shows what the purpose of

the poem is in just two lines: do not give yourself up to death so easily.
 Dylan Thomas’ message is how his father shouldn’t give up easily. The speaker wants

the reader to understand that life should be lived to the fullest and when confronted by death,

giving up shouldn’t be the way to go out. In the final stanza, one of the lines state, “Curse, bless,

me now with your fierce tears, I pray.”. This line specifically describes his pain and begs his

father not to give in too easily. Death is the only thing that’s guaranteed in life and if we’re going

to come upon it, giving up easily isn't the way to go. Dylan Thomas wanted to give the reader a

proper understanding of the poem; do not go gentle into that good night.