Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night

Do not go gentle into that good night

The poem is about the poet encouraging his helplessness father to fight death. His father was afraid to die, but the poet is using the poem to show that death is not the scariest thing. The scariest thing is refusing to fight death. The poet uses angry words to express his opinion about how his father should not accept death, but should instead do everything he can to avoid dying. The poet constructs death as a terrible thing that should be delayed as long as possible, while he constructs life as the happiest thing that should be prolonged at all costs.

There are many examples of figurative language, and he uses dark, sad, and painful language for topics about death. The author uses "close of day" to refer to death and uses "burn and rage" to refer to fighting death. If we take human life as a day, the "close of day" will be the end of the day and happiness as we know it. Next, "burn" is a similar meaning to fight. Burning is a painful thing, and he is saying that we should submit ourselves to painfully fighting death, which implies he believes the pain we feel after death would be much worse than fighting it. And for rage, the definition of rage is very angry, so the author wants to describe how we should strongly use anger to fight death, thus, "burn and rage" is the same meaning as strongly fight death. This is figurative language.

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It also has personification, which implies that more than just my body dies, but there is also death within others, as I die. The author uses "dying of the light" to refer to my death. Light is the symbol of happiness, joy, and existence. When the light dies, not only I die, but also the existence and happiness and joy within other people close to me dies. The author fears that the joy and happiness (light) inside of him will die if his father dies. To avoid this, he encourages his father to fight.

The author implies that as time passes, we become older and wait for death, but we should not accept it. We must instead struggle and fight death, rather than giving up easily or "going gentle into that good night." This poem states "old age should burn and rage at close of day; rage, rage against the dying of the light." It claims that even in older age, we still should maintain our energy (burn and rage), so we have the power and stamina to fight death.

The author uses wise men as a model to encourage his father to fight death. Knowing that his father wants to be a wise man, he says wise men would fight death. Because a wise man holds on to life, wise men must know that death is bad. Only a fool will give up to death, because foolish people, unlike the wise men, don't know how miserable death really is. The wise men know that if they fight death, they can still accomplish their goals, so