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.

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My Papa's Waltz : Style

“My Papa’s Waltz” follows a loose ballad form. Its four-line stanzas feature an ABAB rhyme scheme — that is, the first line rhymes with the third and the second rhymes with the fourth, as in head/bed and dirt/shirt. The words on each line generally alternate between unstressed and stressed syllables. For example: my MOTH / er’s COUN / tenANCE could NOT / unFROWN / itSELF. Each pair (or “foot”) of unstressed and stressed syllables is known as an “iamb”; so the meter of “My Papa’s Waltz” is called “iambic.” Since each line generally contains three iambs, the meter may more precisely be called “iambic trimeter,” meaning that each line is composed of three (the “tri” in “trimeter”) iambs.

Roethke varies this pattern considerably, however. Several lines have seven syllables rather than six, and in many places the iambic rhythm is disrupted. Line 14, for instance, has a very uneven pattern; only the last two syllables form an iamb: with a / PALM CAKED / HARD / by DIRT This irregular form of iambic meter is called “ballad meter,” since many ballads have just such variations in their meters. Irregularities often give a poem an informal, conversational feel. This seems entirely appropriate to “My Papa’s Waltz,” with its elements of nostalgic reminiscence. The variations in meter also suggest instability, however, and here they emphasize the father’s unsteadiness. The poem’s departures from the regularity of the iambic meter seem to mimic the father’s missed steps.

The unsteadiness is also brought out by the seven-syllable lines. In several cases, the extra syllables are the result of so-called “feminine,” or two-syllable, rhymes, as in dizzy/easy and knuckle/buckle. Feminine rhymes are often employed in comic verse, as they have a lighter, less emphatic feel than “masculine,” or one-syllable, rhymes. Here Roethke employs them to evoke a sense of uncertainty, a “dizzy” quality that is well suited to the father’s erratic dancing.

Compare & Contrast

• 1948: As the British mandate over Palestine comes to an end, Israel is recognized as an independent state and opens her doors to the world’s Jewish population.

  1997: A peace treaty is negotiated by American President Bill Clinton between Israelis and Palestinians in April, but breaks down within months as fighting resumes.

• 1948: The term “cold war” is coined by U.S. presidential adviser Bernard Baruch to express the tacit conflicts between communist and democratic superpowers, the U.S.S.R., and the U.S.

  November 9,1990: The cold war symbolically ends as the Berlin Wall is dismantled. Germany is reunited and the Soviet Union begins its dissolution into smaller entities — in many cases, according to their former ethnic status.

• 1948: Apartheid, the practice of separating the races, is established by vote on May 26 in South Africa.

  February 11, 1990: After 27 years in prison, the president of the African National Congress Nelson Mandela is freed. A few years later, he is elected as president of South Africa.

• 1948: Jackson Pollock begins to paint with splashes of color and line, reducing painting to its basic formal elements. This trend in painting becomes to be known as Abstract Expressionism.

  Today: Gender, politics, ethnicity and other art media have entered the arena of painting, which today can only be called “postmodern.”

• 1948: McDonald’s opens its first self-service restaurant in San Bernadino, California.

  Today: McDonald’s has more than 15,000 restaurants and 21 percent of the fast-food market in the U.S. Because domestic profits are climbing slowly, McDonald’s has expanded overseas where less competition, lighter market saturation and its already high profile have brought success.

• 1948: The long-play 33-1/3 rpm record is introduced, revolutionizing the music industry as the new medium can hold more music than can the 78 rpm record.

  The mid-1980s: Forty years later, the compact disc begins another revolution in the industry, replacing vinyl records.

mother to son : Style

Since “Mother to Son” is a dramatic monologue, the primary purpose of Hughes’s word choices and line arrangements is to quickly and convincingly capture the speech and character of a disadvantaged African-American mother. To more closely approximate the rhythms and folk diction, or word choices, of a black persona or character, Hughes uses a number of poetic and literary techniques. He writes in free verse, meaning the lines are un-rhymed and vary in length and meter (the pattern of beats in each line). Specifically, the number of syllables per line varies from one (line 7 is “Bare.”) to ten (in line 20, which iambic pentameter). In addition to capturing the rhythms of ordinary speech, the poem’s irregular line lengths may mirror the setbacks, turns, and uneven progress of the speaker on her life’s climb. Sometimes, a poem’s shape on the page reinforces its themes.

Hughes uses other markers of African-American speech, such as contractions and colloquial uses of the verb “to be”: “I’se been a-climbin’ on” and such variations as “set” for “sit”: “Don’t you set down.” Hughes sought to represent African-American speech with dignity and verve for, in the hands of many white American writers, black dialect was used to perpetuate stereotypes of black ignorance. Hughes sought to overturn such caricatures by representing humor, strength, wisdom, and music in the plain speech of his African-American poetic personas. After carefully interpreting the mother’s insights and messages to her son, the reader recognizes that in “Mother to Son” and many of Hughes’s poems, uneducated diction signifies a lifetime of reduced opportunity rather than ignorance or lazy speech. Thus, the emotional drama of the mother’s will to persist is heightened considerably by the disadvantage that her diction bespeaks.