User:BilboSwaggins25/Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night

Analysis
The poem is in iambic pentameter, and has a rhyme scheme of ABA ABA ABA ABA ABA ABAA. It follows standard villanelle form: six stanzas, comprised of five tercets and a quatrain that utilize alternating refrains established in the first and third lines of the first stanza.

In the first stanza of "Do Not Go Gentle", the speaker encourages their father not to "go gentle into that good night" but rather to "rage, rage against the dying of the light." Then, in the subsequent stanzas, they proceed to list all manner of men, using terms such as "wise," "good," "wild," and "grave" as descriptors, who, in their own respective ways, embody the refrains of the poem. In the final stanza, the speaker implores their father, whom they observe upon a "sad height," begging him to "Curse, bless, me now with your fierce tears", and reiterates the refrains once more.

While this poem has inspired a significant amount of unique discussion and analysis from critics such as Seamus Heaney, Jonathan Westphal, and Walford Davies, some interpretations of the poem’s meaning are under general consensus. “This is obviously a threshold poem about death” Heaney writes, and Westphal agrees, noting that “[Thomas] is advocating active resistance to death.” Heaney thinks that the poem's structure as a villanelle "[turns] upon itself, advancing and retiring to and from a resolution" in order to convey "a vivid figure of the union of opposites" that encapsulates “the balance between natural grief and the recognition of necessity which pervades the poem as a whole.”

Westphal writes that the "sad height" Thomas refers to in line 16 is “of particular importance and interest in appreciating the poem as a whole.” He asserted that it was not a literal structure, such as a bier, not only because of the literal fact that Thomas’ father died after the poem’s publication, but also because "it would be pointless for Thomas to advise his father not to 'go gentle' if he were already dead..." Instead, he thinks that Thomas' phrase refers to “a metaphorical plateau of aloneness and loneliness before death.” Davies disagrees, instead believing that the imagery is in more allusive in nature, and that it "clearly evokes both King Lear on the heath and Gloucester thinking he is at Dover Cliff."