Poems have significant impacts on our social lives, as they pass the message and keep people informed. Understanding the message in a poem requires concentration and alertness of one’s mind. Poems have different styles, which content creators use to incorporate messages. Dylan Thomas wrote the poem entitled “Do not go gentle into that good night” to address death. This is an analysis of the poem’s fifth stanza to explain death and to identify instruments used to compile the poem.
In the stanza, Thomas refers to men who are near death. Grave men can be seriously sick people or elderly. It is believed that Thomas was inspired to write the poem by his father, who was about to die (Ashley). Throughout the poem, the author encourages different types of men to not give up on death, but instead they should fight it. In the first line of the stanza, Thomas uses the term “blinding sight” to symbolize an ending journey, while the refrain “Rage, rage against the dying of the light” encourages the dying men to find strength and energy to live another day. Thomas used the Villanelle and Enjambment instruments to compile the poem. The poem contains 19 lines, five tercets, a refrain, a rhyming line, and a concluding quatrain which symbolizes a villanelle structure.
A poem whose stanza lines end with a punction mark symbolizes Enjambment. Thomas creates motion and tension through the use of end stops on the tercets’ lines to keep the reader eager to know what happens next. The poem makes me feel scared as it talks about death which seems to be inevitable. All of the identified men seem to encounter death at different points in their lives, reminding me that one day I will have to face death. The poem can be used to motivate and encourage hurting people, although I would get emotional while narrating.
Work Cited
Robinson, Ashley. “Full Expert Analysis: “Do not go gentle into that good night” by Dylan Thomas.” PrepScholar, 2019.