Montse Fruits Cortijo Facing death: Do not go gentle into that good night by Dylan Thomas Dylan Marlais

Thomas was a Welsh writer born in 1914 and dead in 1953. He started writing very soon, his first poem was published, when he was eighteen, and was an early version of "And Death Shall Have No Dominion." The cycle of life and death formed a constant underlying theme throughout his poetry. His obscurity writting and his excessively drinking habbit made him to be called a bohemian or a damned poet. "Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night", a moving plea villanelle (a villanelle is a poem that has nineteen lines long, consisting of five tercets and one concluding quartrain. The first and third lines of the first stanza are rhyming refrains that alternate as the third line in each successive stanza and form a couplet at the close) written to his dying father ( in 1954), death takes on a new and intensely personal meaning for Thomas. Even though, the poem was published in 1952 In country Sleep after his father's death. We can clearly say that the narrator is an alter ego of Thomas who discusses various ways to approach death in old age in order to finally claim his father to confront death till the last breath, rather than eventually accept it. He uses old wise men, good men, wild men, and grave men and their resistance to death as examples of what he should do. But another reading of this poem can be the author's own fear of death as he seems to fear having little separation between life and death. Each of the six stanzas have uniformity and a specific purpose, the first one is an introduction of both, the poem and the two refrains Do not go gentle into that good night and Rage, rage against the dying of the light. The next four stanzas describe four different types of old men and examine their attitudes and feelings as they realize that death is approaching. The last stanza, the more personal, in which the speaker adresses to his father to make him fight against death, is the conclusion and the main point of the poem. This poem about his dying father shows the tragedy of knowing that he would lose his father, but also his own fear of death as a close partner of life.