This essay examines a shared generational perspective found in three poems: Dylan Thomas's "Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night," Linda Pastan's "Go Gentle," and Elizabeth Bishop's "Sestina." The paper argues that all three poems portray younger individuals as having little or no understanding of death compared to those in older generations who must confront it directly. Through close reading of each poem, the essay traces how the narrators in Thomas and Pastan witness and respond to their fathers' suffering, and how the child in Bishop's poem remains entirely unaware of the grandmother's grief. Together, the poems illustrate how lived experience shapes one's relationship with mortality.
Dylan Thomas, Linda Pastan, and Elizabeth Bishop each include a common generational perspective within their poems. All three focus on relationships between members of older and younger generations, and all engage with the reality of death. The central similarity shared by the three poems is that they portray how younger individuals, unlike older ones, have little or no understanding of the experience of death and its consequences.
Linda Pastan's "Go Gentle" is similar in certain ways to Dylan Thomas's "Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night." Both poems touch upon the relationship between two individuals of different generations. In each poem, the individual from the older generation is the narrator's father, and in both cases the narrator witnesses the father being slowly overtaken by death.
The father in Thomas's poem continuously agonizes over his imminent death, which he has not yet accepted. This is evident when Thomas depicts the father as being "there on a sad height," and the narrator pleads with him to "curse, bless, me now with your fierce tears, I pray." In Pastan's poem, the narrator similarly witnesses her father agonizing over his imminent death, which is apparent when she writes that "you have grown wings of pain and flap around the bed like a wounded gull."
In both poems the narrators attempt to advise their fathers on how to face death. In Thomas's poem, witnessing his father's agony on his deathbed, the narrator urges his father to prolong life as much as possible by refusing to surrender his struggle. In the final stanza, through lines that recur throughout the poem, the narrator implores: "Do not go gentle into that good night. / Rage, rage against the dying of the light." Thomas renders death metaphorically as "the good night" and "the dying of the light."
"Narrators urge opposite responses to dying"
"Child unaware of grandmother's grief and loss"
The child's obliviousness to death and its consequences is also largely due to the fact that children, being the youngest of generations, are the least able to relate to the reality of death. As Bishop's poem makes clear, children are often shielded from learning about death at an early age because of their tendency to be easily frightened by such a reality. Thus, all three poems convey that younger generations are less aware than older ones of the reality of death precisely because they have not experienced it as often.
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