Death Sadly is Inevitable...

This week in English 3, we explored Shakespeare’s “Sonnet 73,” and Dylan Thomas’ “Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night.” Although the two poems concentrate on the aspect of striving for life, even though death is inevitable, Dylan and Shakespeare take different approaches to grasp this message. The structure that they conform to ultimately allows their message to be expressed differently.

Shakespeare did not write his poem in a villanelle structure, as Dylan Thomas did for his poem, but uses a 14-lined sonnet structure. Shakespeare’s choice of using the sonnet structure gave him three quatrains to express different scenes of life approaching death, and a last couplet to address who truly was approaching death now. For each quatrain, Shakespeare uses a different kind of time flow of life going towards death. However, he makes each quatrain express a smaller amount of time for each event to occur. In the first quatrain, Shakespeare uses seasons to represent the coming of death. Autumn’s life slowly turns into the lifeless winter. The transition from one season to another represents the passing of a year. In the second quatrain, Shakespeare describes the passing of the day to night. Dylan uses day and night in his poem, but Shakespeare uses these two in his poem to emphasize time passing rather than symbolizing life and death. In the third quatrain, Shakespeare uses fire, not as a symbol of passion (which Dylan uses in his poem), but as a smaller increment of time. Fire will extinguish within hours due to its ashes. So by Shakespeare shortening the time span for each, he represents how life gets closer and closer to death as time passes by. Dylan did not manipulate this idea to create his message. But in Shakespeare’s last couplet, he does not give a name or real title to who he is addressing to. Dylan, on the other hand, addresses his poem to his father.

Dylan conforms his poem to the villanelle structure. This structure allows Dylan to include his message of striving for life in his first stanza, rather than Shakespeare, who places it at the end of his poem. In this stanza, he conveys the message by using night and light as representations of death and life. In the second, third, fourth, and fifth stanzas, Dylan’s choice of structure allows him to grant each of these stanzas with a specific type of men, rather than a flow of time. With each of the four stanzas containing the same number of lines, there is no single emphasis on just one type of man. Throughout these four stanzas, Dylan emphasizes the differences among these types of men through the inclusion of symbolic uses of nature. He uses words such as “lightning,” “green bay,” “sun,” and even “meteors” (lines 5, 8, 10, 14). Also, by Dylan putting the line “Do not go gentle…” or “Rage, rage…” at the end of each of these stanzas, he ultimately reinforces his message of striving for life throughout the poem. And with Dylan’s last stanza, he truly makes use of these two lines. Dylan does use the last stanza to make a reference to whom he is addressing, but by the last stanza being the biggest stanza in a villanelle, Dylan also uses this stanza to emphasize how he pleads for his father to fight for his life. He does this ultimately by putting both two repeated lines together in the last stanza. Shakespeare does not implement this tactic in his sonnet.

Shakespeare’s limitation to the sonnet structure allowed him only three descriptions of life turning to death. So ultimately Shakespeare made use of just nature for symbolic purposes and to create a time lapse getting closer to death. Dylan’s choice of the longer villanelle structure allowed Dylan to not be as restricted as Shakespeare was, and elaborate more on how his father was. Dylan having more stanzas, allowed him to express several types of men who strive for prolonging their inevitable death.