“Going gentle” is to accept the death before it comes, to let himself die without any other option.
“That good night” is the symbol of the death itself, a metaphor that the poet uses to refer to the end of life. But at the same time, the poet says that death is something good.
As we can see, from the poem, Thomas recognize the fact that we must not fight against death, but we must fight against the death that has come before its time, we must fight when death is fooling us and it takes us to the other world when we should be alive. In the second line “Old age should burn and rave at close of day”, what Thomas is trying to say to his father is how the older people should notice that the gift of life its life itself and them, and this is why they should fight even harder than others to keep themselves alive, they should fight with rage against death so they can say their last words whenever they want to, and do not let death take them in a passive way.
After the message that Thomas is giving to his father, he shows other people in different circumstances.
In the first group we find wise people, maybe philosophers. They are the ones that know that the darkness is good, because they already know how they should look and what they should have for the final stage of their lives, but they are not going in a peaceful way, because their wisdom have not given the social contribution that they wanted, their words have not shown any sign that improves the life of others, so their great wisdom is useless. Usually we see to the wise people as the braves that had face to nature, in this case to death, but Thomas might be showing a different perspective of this kind of man, he is saying that wise people was not enough wise, that their words were not capable to show any kind of reality but the pure speculation that death is something good and positive, and even though, they are not capable of die peacefully.
After this, the good men that are in the poem, they let life to pass by without any objection, without stop to see the short and fast that life goes away. With the words “bright; green bay” the poet shows a beautiful world, full of happy thins that are the contrast of “frail deeds” that are things without any importance in their lives. It is like if they were sorry for the things that they have done during their lives, as if they were thinking that their lives were meaningless and that what they have done was useless to others.
In the fourth verse, Thomas is speaking about other kind of men, the “wild men”.
In the first line, he makes the use of the sun as a symbol. He talk about the men that are capable to reach the sun while they are singing, but they can not see that with this, the sun is following them so they can not go gentle in to the good night.
This could be a symbolic image of how we spent our lives in a wrong way and how we can see too late that life goes on and that sooner than later, darkness will take us away. In this poem, Thomas teaches us that it does not matter what the wild men could learn from life or the conclusions that they could take from their own experiences, because for them, death will always get too soon and they will get a heavy and empty feeling that each time will take them to their own death.
In the fifth verse of the poem, the “grave men”, Thomas shows us how this grave men, when they are near to death, are too formal to see that death could be something good. This could be a symbol to his father, trying to say that it does not matter if he was blind, wise, wild or grave, through the eyes of his intellect, of his mind, of his interior; he was capable to see great things. Thomas is saying to his father that he must fight against death and share any experience that could provoke his death so he do not loose forever. Thomas is reminding to his father that during the process of death, you can see the real meaning of life, so it is important to fight against death and enjoy this last moments.
The last part of the poem is the union of the whole poem, and it unifies all the images and themes in just one block. This is the moment when the reader can tell that he is talking about his father, because he refers to him in a direct way “and you my father”. The following lines for me are the most important ones “Curse, bless me now with your fierce tears I pray.” Here, Thomas tells us that his father will cry fearfully as a symbol of his fight against death and that maybe his father will bless him or curse him for all what he is making him go through.
This poem obviously is related to the personal life of Thomas and his father, but we can apply it to each one of our lives, because anyone could be in the same situation, the father’s situation, or Thomas’s situation.
The poem makes me think that we must valuate life and to take the best of it, even in our deathbed, that we must not be weak or lazy in our way to death, we must be good, wise, graves and even some times we must get a little bit wild to appreciate what life is offering to us.
