[30 Pts] Please help ASAP!!! (Poem at the bottom)


You will now work through Dylan Thomas’s “Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night” stanza by stanza, answering questions as you go.


First Stanza

1. What image in the words “burn and rave” suggest? Why should someone “burn and rave at close of day?”

2. The word rage can mean “anger,” but it can also mean “passion”—an outpouring of feeling. How might Thomas have been using both meanings in the poem?


Second Stanza

3. Though the wise men might “know” that it is time to die, the speaker says that they still fight death because “their words had forked no lightning.” What does this mean?

4. What images do you see in this stanza?


Third Stanza

5. These good people cry “how bright their frail deeds might have danced in a green bay.” What does this mean?

6. What imagery do you see in this stanza?


Fourth Stanza

7. How might these people have “sang the sun in flight” and then “grieved” it?

8. What imagery do you see in this stanza?


Fifth Stanza

9. What images do you see in stanza 5?


Sixth Stanza

10. Why do all these men not go gently into death?

11. What role do light and darkness play in the poem?


Poem~


Do not go gentle into that good night,

Old age should burn and rave at close of day;

Rage, rage against the dying of the light.


Though wise men at their end know dark is right,

Because their words had forked no lightning they

Do not go gentle into that good night.


Good men, the last wave by, crying how bright

Their frail deeds might have danced in a green bay,

Rage, rage against the dying of the light.


Wild men who caught and sang the sun in flight,

And learn, too late, they grieved it on its way,

Do not go gentle into that good night.


Grave men, near death, who see with blinding sight

Blind eyes could blaze like meteors and be gay,

Rage, rage against the dying of the light.


And you, my father, there on the sad height,

Curse, bless, me now with your fierce tears, I pray

Do not go gentle into that good night.

Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Respuesta :

The speaker addresses an unknown listener, telling him not to "go gentle into that good night."

At first this is a puzzling metaphor but, by the end of line 3, we realize that the speaker is using night as a metaphor for death: the span of one day could represent a man's lifetime, which makes the sunset his approaching demise.

"That good night" is renamed at the end of line 2 as the "close of day," and at the end of line 3 as "the dying of the light." It's probably not an accident that the metaphor for death keeps getting repeated at the end of the lines, either. Or that the two rhyming words that begin the poem are "night" and "day."

So what does the speaker want to tell us about death? Well, he thinks that old men shouldn't die peacefully or just slip easily away from this life. Instead, they should "burn and rave," struggling with a fiery intensity.