Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night

Billy

Reader Response #4

For Dylan Thomas’s work Do not go Gentle Into that Good Night, he used a Villanelle as his form of poetry. In this form of poetry you are limited to 19 lines, and I think that this was the best form for this particular poem because 19 lines lets you have enough room to fully express the feeling of the poem, but it also constrains you and makes you inject more feeling to your words and it makes them hold more weight. This does a great deal for this work as it makes the lines seem shorter and more to the point, almost as if the intensity builds up during the course of the poem like a halftime speech from your coach, trying to motivate you to “Do not go gentle into that good night”. That is how I read this poem, as a speech, a source of encouragement to not just lay down and accept death as a part of life. Because of the shortened length and the succinctness of a Villanelle, you almost have to read it as something with high intensity because Thomas is wanting you to spit in the eye of death, and that is something that you have to be motivated to do because of the absurdity of the idea, and I feel that is something that definitely was an advantage for him in this poem.

One of the advantages for Miller Williams in The Shrinking Lonesome Sestina is the pattern of the words. For most of the poem, the last word of the last line of one of the stanzas was the last word of the first line in the following stanza. This pattern and repetition helps the reader keep track of what is being read and in return helps them grasp the content a little better.