“Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night,” is an insightful poem written by Dylan Thomas. It is a Villanelle, a nineteen-line form of poetry.
The message Dylan Thomas is trying to communicate through this poem is that the elderly should not be discouraged and feel hopeless due to their age. Thomas seems to think it is not honorable or befitting for a great or interesting man to die quietly in old age and he encourages the reader to think that death is something that should be fought rather than mutely accepted. The poem is a statement about living a strong life and refusing to go down quietly just as easily as it can be read as a poem about death and the process of dying or aging.
All through the poem, the poet speaks about fighting the …show more content…
inevitable death and being strong till the last moment despite knowing that death cannot be avoided. All of it seems to target any old man nearing death until the last Stanza in which he addresses his father and says : And you, my father, there on the sad height,
Curse, bless, me now with your fierce tears, I pray. And then he repeats what have said earlier in the poem : Do not go gentle into that good night.
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
And by that he urges his dying father to resist and fiercely fight death, which makes the poets tone more personal.
While in the other poem, " The Holy Sonnet 10" Death be not proud, by John Donne.
Right off the bat, the poet starts bashing on death and treating "it" like a person. He tells Death not to be so proud, because he's really not that frightening, despite that many people think that so. The poet then speaks in contradictions by saying that people do not really meet Death, and neither will the poet.
He then compares death to things that are not scary at all, rest and sleep. He then says that only the good die young, whilst the best know that death is not scary at all, but it brings pleasure instead.
The poet then kicks it up a notch, as if all that bashing was not enough.
The poet calls death a Delivery of the soul, while the bones have a rest. He then calls him a slave of Fate, chance, kings, and desperate men and accuses him of hanging out with the weak and lowlifes " poison, war, and sickness." And that after all, the poet doesn't need death, for he can just take drugs, and it will have the same effect, falling
asleep.
So the poet compares death to falling asleep, a painless process of temporary rest, After which one will wake up from death and find himself in Eternity, and once that happens, it will seems as though Death has died...