The poem Do not go gentle into the good night is a poem talking about death, and how you should not give up on life when you are dying. it is also probably about making the most of your life. Iambic pentameter is used in each and every stanza, but only fully for the first line, after this it degenerates and fades away. This is a way of showing the dying. The dying of the wise men, good men, wild men grave men and Dylan Thomas’ father. The Iambic pentameter in this is used to represent life or even a heartbeat in this poem, whereas in Hamlet Iambic pentameter represents sanity, or the mental condition of a certain character as well as the “nobleness” of them. (Hamlet while usually speaks in Iambic pentameter, whilst the gravediggers speak in prose.) This shows that while the two texts share Iambic pentameter they are used to represent different things.
The repetition of the “Do not go gentle into that good night” reinforces the poets idea that you should die fighting, holding on, not to just gently pass on. Dylan Thomas is aware that death is inevitable and that we all must die eventually and shows this during the poem. The author also shows a different attitude towards death, or how a person lives in the face of death. This shown by the quote at the start of the paragraph and the title that has been given to the poem.
In Hamlet, (Act 1 scene 5) Hamlet’s father tells him advice ( and to kill his uncle ) on what he should do, but in this poem the son is telling the father what to do instead. This shows the “reversed” roles of each of the characters in the different texts.
Do not go gentle into the good night has a constant structure, called a villanelle. Villanelles have 19 lines in total, the first five stanzas are three lined and have an “aba” rhyming scheme. the last stanza is 4 lines and has an “abaa” rhyming scheme, conversely Hamlet’s to be or not to be soliloquy does not have any proper/ constant structure or rhyme scheme. This structure of Do not go gentle into that good night shows that Dylan Thomas is sure and confident about his idea that he expresses throughout the poem, whereas in Hamlet’s to be or not to be soliloquy the fact that it is not very structured shows Hamlets indecisiveness on whether to kill himself or not.
React!