Imagery In 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 rhetorical 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 rhetorical 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.” & “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 potrayed 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.