Death in Thomas and Dickinson
In many ways, Dylan Thomas' "Do not go gentle into that good night" and Emily Dickinson's "Because I could not stop for death" are ideal texts to consider when attempting to examine human beings anxieties regarding death, dying, and the longing for permanence, because they make vastly different points in strikingly similar ways. That is to say, while they share some elements of form, style, and topic, the commentary they give on the topic could not be more different. As the title suggests, Thomas' poem is a vocal entreaty to struggle for every bit of life in the face of impermanence, while Dickinson's poem takes a positively lackadaisical approach to the concept of death, viewing it as a transition into immortality rather than a fall into obscurity and darkness. However, despite their nearly oppositional statements regarding death, one can actually view the two poems as a synthesis of humanity's own oppositional and sometimes contradictory views regarding death. By examining the two poems in conjunction with each other, it becomes clear that both the acceptance and refusal of death are born out of the same human need to generate meaning from the finite experience of a seemingly infinite universe.
At the most basic level, all human meaning is born out of narrative, simply because human beings experience time in a linear fashion, and as a result all meaning comes from the linking between one event and the next. Thus, "narratives are the way in which humans make sense of the world, including its peoples, institutions, and myriad individuals" (Young, 2001, p. 275). This is true not only of language and culture, but also individual experience, because even the concept of the "self" is dependent on creating an internal narrative of past experiences (Young, 2001, p. 275-76).
As a result, birth and death have special places within human beings' own personal narratives, because they mark the points at which the individual cannot affect his or her own story. Although people might be aware of what came before their birth, and could likely predict some of what comes after their death, these events nevertheless place hard limits on the extent of any individuals personal, experienced narrative. Furthermore, because death is the event which has not happened yet, and all evidence indicates that everything that makes up a person ends with death and the shutdown of the human body (such as memory and personality), this event is viewed with extra apprehension, mystery, and fear. Even if there is some sort of afterlife, the living have no access to it, and so for all intents and purposes death means the end of the story, at least for the person living it.
Humans have largely reacted to this fact in one of two ways, and although they represent different tacks, they are not mutually exclusive (which shall be seen when discussing Thomas and Dickinson in greater detail). On the one hand, the finality of death and the "meaninglessness" that follows it has encouraged people to hold it off for as long as possible, attempting to prolong life and thus wring as much meaning out of it as possible before the body shuts down and the internal narrative that is consciousness disappears. This view makes obvious sense, because if death means the end of consciousness and experience, then it is only logical to want to get the most out of life as possible, effectively "getting one's money's worth," as much as that metaphor is applicable to human existence.
The other option is essentially an attempt to "cheat" death by ensuring the survival of one's legacy, such that the end of one's internal narrative experience need not mean the end of one's "story," so long as that story survives, whether in the minds of other people or in the permanent structures left behind, such as gravestones and monuments. As the reader can likely guess, the first position is exemplified by Thomas' poem, while the latter is expressed by Dickinson's. While the two positions are oppositional, in that one depends on a kind of antagonism toward death while the other depends on an acceptance of it, they can also be complementary, and examining the two poems will help demonstrate how these two positions have defined human conceptions of death.
Even before discussing the content of either poem one may note their formal and stylistic similarities. Both poems are six stanzas long with just a few lines in...
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