Do Not Gentle Into That Good Night, By Dylan Thomas

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Everyone thinks about death differently. One person can be depressed from it while the other has come to terms with it. These different interpretations about death can be seen and reflected in many forms of art, including literature. Some poets have written poems that have to do with death in one-way or another. Many of these poems come from personal experiences with death. Others can just be personal observations made of other people who have experienced a death of a loved one. We as readers can learn many different types of perspective on this topic of death by reading many poems by various poets. For example, “Do not Gentle into that Good Night” by Dylan Thomas tells the reader that when death come close to your doorstep they should fight …show more content…

This poem is Dickinson’s own personal observation on the stages of feelings a person can go through after experiencing a traumatic experience, such as death of a loved one. She paints a very vivid painting of these feelings in her stanzas. Nerves turn like tombstones, numb, the heart feels dead and is in disbelief that the event ever even happened, and makes the sufferer become mechanical when doing something; almost like the person no longer feels anything, like a robot. This poem draws many similarities with the famous five stages of grief that Freud later talked about. As a child, I had a pet rabbit that I adored very much. I would always play with it and feed it. One day, on my birthday, my best friend at the time, Miguel, picked it up to play with it and on accident dropped him on the pavement floor. I was devastated to find out my beloved pet rabbit had died on my birthday. From what I remember, what I felt afterwards was something similar to what Dickinson wrote in her poem “After a Great Pain, a Formal Feeling Comes.” When I first found out the news, I completely froze and the once grinning face of my younger self disappeared and replaced with tears. I kept telling myself that my rabbit was just asleep, that it would wake up and we would be happy again. Unfortunately for me, it was not asleep and I spent the next few weeks feeling numb, doing simple tasks mechanically as Dickinson would describe in her poem. The poem has taught me how one might feel and act in the event that they suffer through a traumatic

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