Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night : Style

Dylan Thomas, partly because of his legendary status as a hard-drinking, wild-living Welshman, is often considered to be a primitive poet, one for whom poems somehow appeared on the page, almost miraculously springing up fully developed out of his passionate nature. In actuality, the contrary is true. Thomas’s poetry is very carefully crafted, and he often uses complicated structures.

“Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night” is an intricately structured villanelle, made up of five tercets, a unit of three lines of verse, followed by a quatrain, a unit of four lines of verse. The opening line of the poem, the first line in die first stanza, also ends the second and fourth tercets. The third and final line of the first tercet serves as the last line in the third and fifth stanzas. They will also become the last two lines of the quatrain.

The entire rhyme scheme of the poem is built around the words that end the first two lines, “night” and “day.” The first and third lines in every stanza rhyme with “night,” while every second line rhymes with “day.” These words serve as more than just a simple rhyme however; they provide the contrasting images that serve as the poem’s core. Thomas also uses internal rhyme to make his poetry flow smoothly, giving it a melodic quality. The poet’s use of alliteration, with its repeated initial sounds, can be seen in the words “go” and “good” in the first line, and “blind” and “blaze” in line 14. The words “caught” and “sang” in line 10 illustrate assonance, or the repetition of similarly located vowel sounds. In line 17, the words “curse” and “bless” are examples of half-rhyme, another convention Thomas frequently employs.

The meter in the poem is described by some critics as basically iambic pentameter, a line of verse featuring segments of two syllables where the first syllables is unstressed and the second is stressed, as in the word “above.” Pentameter means that there are five such segments in each line — “penta” meaning “five.” But Thomas’s poetry seldom fits neatly into conventional metric analysis. Therefore many critics choose to view his poetry in terms of the number of syllables in each lines, rather than by metric feet. Thus “Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night” may also be described as decasyllabic, having ten syllables in a line.

taken from here...