Do not go gentle into that good night

Reading the title, the intelligent reader may be curious to find out why the person the speaking voice is speaking to shouldn’t go in that good night why this night is good. To notice is also the use of that, so the recipient should know of what night the speaker is refiring to. The most stressed words are “gentle” and “good”, the poet wants to draw the attention of the reader on these words maybe because they characterize the meaning of the title and perhaps also the text, they are also highlighted with an alliteration.

The poem is organized into six stanzas, five tercets and a quatrain, so the poem has a regular patter that is interrupted by the last stanza. Also, the rhyme scheme is regular and it’s ABA, but also in this case is interrupted by the same stanza, in which the rhyme scheme is ABAB.

In all the economy the poet is speaking about the general argument of death, alluding to it by the use of the expressions “dark” and “the dying of the light”. In particular the last stanza is a conclusion of the poem, where we understand the recipient of all said in the poem is the father of the poet, that is dying. So, it seems like in all the poem the speaking voice is trying to reassure his father, while he is praying for him.

Watching the way how the poem looks in the page the reader attention is attracted by the last stanza that is longer than the other so it may contain more important information than the previous one, infect, if we read first the last stanza and then the others the reading of the poem is much clearer, because it contains the information necessary to understand the meaning of poetry.

In a lot of stanzas there’s the repetition of the title, that’s the core of the poem, the pray of the poet, that hopes his father continue to live. A very important repetition to notice is the use, for the rhyme, in every stanza, of or the expression “the dying of the light” of or the word “night”, that , as we said before, are either metaphor to allude to the death.