Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night

"Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night"
Dylan Thomas

Honestly, I did not really understand either of the last two poems in this unit, so I chose to answer a couple of the questions from Thomas' poem which was the less confusing piece.  The poem is divided into six stanzas, the last four of which describe four different types of men.  The speaker views the wise men as knowing "dark is right" (Thomas, page 968).  I think it means that wise men really expect death and know that no one is eternal.  He claims that the good men "rage against the dying of the light," which I believe indicates that they would rather live on in life and perform other works than die and stop living how they had been.  The wild men are the ones who partied and sang their way through life, not stopping to thing on death.  The grave men also rage against the night because they thought too much of dying that they never stopped to live.
      Another question asked about paradoxical expressions which were included in several lines, such as "dark is right" and "the sad height."  These contribute to the idea that different people see death in different lights.  Some men expect death, some rage against death, some never thought about it until it was too late, and some rage against death because they waited for death their whole lives.  The poem was very interesting because it ended with a stanza begging his father "not [to] go gentle into that good night."