Analysis Of Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night By Dylan Thomas

Even one of the most famous poets of all time went through immense trials and tribulations. However, these struggles are what shaped Dylan Thomas’s work and who he is as a poet. Dylan Thomas’s addiction to alcohol, the skepticism of his sanity, and the loss of his father to cancer all contributed to his famous poem “Do Not Go Gentle into that Good Night”. Dylan Thomas’s addiction to alcohol was one of the biggest struggles in his career. His problem was infamous, and hence drew a lot of attention. He was known for being a wild alcoholic, and succeeded best at writing in this state. He claimed that when he was sober, his poetry “would not keep a goldfish alive.” Towards the end of his life, he even suffered writer’s block for many years,

The poem is addressed to Dylan Thomas’s father, David John, who was battling cancer at the time. His father was what originally inspired Thomas to be a poet. He read Shakespeare to him as a young boy. He was always a strict and sharp-tongued man, but after becoming ill, he mellowed out. It pained Dylan Thomas to see his father so peaceful, because he had been very sarcastic and angry his whole life. His ill father was just a shadow of his former self. In the poem, he urges his father to “not go gentle into that good night”. “That good night” represents death and the end of his pain. He knows that his father is going to a better place, but he doesn’t want him to fade peacefully. Dylan Thomas’s pain and grief is expressed in line 17 when he wants his father to, “Curse, bless, me now with your fierce tears". His father’s temper was a curse, but he wants to be blessed with his fierce attitude because he misses him. It broke his heart to see him so beat down, despite however the nature of their relationship in his childhood was. His father’s struggle with cancer was the main influence on the poem, and it shaped Dylan Thomas as a