Ballad

Joaquin’s Benevolent Ballad

Venture with my past to be.

Our light feet upon lighter stones,

With disheveled winter coats

And penny pockets full.

As we crack our knuckle bones

To clever little quotes.

Through ancient land made by modern text,

Where day is still, like fixed vulture eyes

And night is prey.

Where the pretty people travel in mass

To avoid all fright and fray.

Let us go, when I am then

And you are yesterday.

To add a noun, a verb;

To allocate both bottle and drink,

‘Til we reflect it from the curb.

Upon the discomfort of our streets,

We can toast to those we’ll never meet.

“Be it by

Where be

It was.”

The apathetic cry.

And in our city of twit and twilight,

We can make designer hats.

Oh, they will sell to those in fright.

“For sun, for shame!”

There’s always a trait to tame.

With music festival at night,

We shall jump from roof to roof

And exploit our fault and flaw

With those of aided eye and broken jaw.

Then back to the vacancy hotel,

To sleep and forget upon the morning bell.

There, we will win our pride,

Hide our tears with The Times.

Let’s lose our thoughts,

And only those that pain,

Lose them to those that owe

For what we remain.

“Be it by

Where be

It was.”

The forgotten cry.

We will leave when we are done

With all of those we could never start

Through times of null, but fun.

With controller in hand,

We shall chose to lose a hold

Of the winds which we command

In our dining hall of grief,

Upon the foggy table of forgotten arms,

We shall sign our dues away,

Reclaim our bills and notes.

We must go, our fate must stay.

And we will visit space and space again,

When our times do not align.

To rest from breaking the hollow in our bones,

Clear clutter in our mind.

And we shall sit beside the moonlight avenue

To watch integrity race humility.

With bottle and pipe in hand,

We will lull, we will drift,

Each into our respective gutter.

Where you are now

And I am not yet.

“Be it by

Where be

It was.”

I cry.

Free Verse

(No Title)

Now my best days are behind me, and there may be some ahead;
But of this I’m very certain, they’re nowhere near my bed.
And I’m waiting for the phone to ring, but I don’t know who I want calling.
Perhaps someone who’s forgotten me in the middle of this dawning,
Or someone I’ve yet to meet in my world of broken fun-house mirrors.
Some useless person who can find some use in me,
Who in all the senseless things I do finds some company.
Someone who will leave me in the ebbing of my nights,
Leave me wondering if his lust was worth the fights.
So that I may mimic, more or less, my last and ultimate digress.

Poetry Analysis Essay - Dylan Thomas

Cynthia Moreno

English 495 ESM

Professor Wexler

10 February 2010

To Fight Death: The Emotional Confrontation

Certain poets write from personal experience and in many cases these experiences may be foreign to readers. Poet’s individual experience is vastly different from the experience of the reader, but there are some themes that are universal to everyone. A poems’ theme is the main idea that the poet is trying to convey. Poems about death are universal across all cultures, when translated they may lose certain messages, but the main idea will be clear. In Dylan Thomas poem, “Do not go gentle into that goodnight,” the poet faces the heartbreaking reality of a dying parent. In the beginning it is unclear whom the poem is about and it is not until the last stanza that the speakers says, “Father”. The speaker begs his father not to accept death quietly, but fight it. Although, speaker pleads for his father to rage against death, in Thomas’ poem “Do not go gentle into that good night,” the poem is not only a plea but also a coping mechanism that allowed the author to confront the death of a parent through poetry.

Thomas strategically put all the elements of this poem together to create a cohesive poetic form where the rhyme, meter, and stanzaic pattern all play an important role. “Do not go gentle into that good night,” is made up of a nineteen-line poem with five tercets and concluding quatrain making it a villanelle in closed form. The poem follows the rhyme scheme aba aba aba aba aba abaa. The meter of the poem is iambic pentameter, although iambic pentameter is commonly used, it suits the antithetical content of the poem. Even though this poem is in the traditional closed form of a villanelle the topic of the poem is not traditional. Traditionally, villanelles are used to talk about light, bucolic subjects that were peaceful and calm, but Thomas uses the villanelle in the antithetical form. Thomas employed the form, but choose to create a poem of “a raging against what is, an acknowledgement that life within natures consists of life and death, and be not just harmoniously repetitive but also full of sudden pain and occasional grieving” (Hochman). The poem is a statement that although life is filled with beauty and joy, and traditionally villanelles express that beauty in the poetic form, life is not always happy, but filled with sorrow and pain.

In analyzing the work one can see that the speaker of the poem is rebelling against nature. The speaker is angry and urges his father to fight “against the dying of the light” (Thomas). In the four middle stanzas of the poem, Thomas describes four different kind of men, wise, good, wild, and those near death. The speaker says, “Grave men, near death, who see with blinding sight / blind eyes could blaze like meteors and be gay, / Rage, rage against the dying of the light” (Thomas), which means that men near death can see clearly, “with blinding sight” and therefore they see everything and are happy. “The speaker of “Do not go gentle into that good night" is caught between his desire that his father continue to live, and live vividly, and his recognition that death is "that good night," perhaps inherently "good" because it is the order of life / nature, perhaps more immediately "good" as the agent for stopping pain, whether physical, mental, or spiritual” (Cyr). Thomas doesn’t really believe that death is “good”, his use of the word “good” is a paradox and it has multiple meanings. Thomas is directly referring to his father in the poem and he pleads to him to rebel against death. In reality Thomas was in such pain over his father’s inevitable death.

Everyone deals with death in different ways, some people mourn alone and others express their grief employing different outlets. The topic of death is universal with all walks of life. It is one of natures’ natural occurrences. Since death is universal, everyone can relate to it in one way or another, whether they have experienced loss of a loved one directly or not. In Dylan Thomas’ case he was forced to face the reality of an ailing father whose death would be upon them soon. Thomas was able to create the villanelle “Do not go gentle into that good night” in response to his sorrow to express his grieving. He asked his father to “rage against the dying of the light” and not give up his life peacefully, but rather with defiance and resistance. Thomas also showed his resistance within the antithetical poetic form of the villanelle. Rebel against what is and do not submit with ease, is a lesson learned through Dylan Thomas’ poetry.

Works Cited

Cyr, Marc D. ""Dylan Thomas's 'Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night': Through 'Lapis

Lazuli' to King Lear"" 1998. Literature Resource Center. Gale. Oviatt Library,

Northridge, Ca. 3 Feb. 2010 .

Hochman, Jhan. "An overview of "Do Not Go Gentle into that Good Night"" 1997. Literature

Resource Center. Gale. Oviatt Library, Northridge, Ca. 3 Feb. 2010.

Smith, Philip. 100 Best-Loved Poems. New York: Dover Publications, 1995. Print.

Week 2: Poetry Analysis

The Use of Imagery to Express the Self

Everyone lives their life which ever way they feel is suitable for themselves. Through the experiences of life one is able to reflect and analyze their own existence or current experience. The writers of the poems assigned for this week are no exception to this. One connection the speakers of the poems share is the self. The poems express some sort of analysis of the self and whether it has been a positive or negative experience. The poets use imagery to describe their experience.

Beginning with "Dover Beach," by Arnold, the speaker is expressing a great sadness that is within himself. He is analyzing the uncertainty that his life is now experiencing since the light's gleam has been gone. The writer creates vivid imagery and one can imagine how the sea is beginning to change and become more violent towards the end of the poem with the speaker expressing his sadness and putting his energy into the ocean. On the other hand, the speaker in Yeats poem, "The Lake Isle of Innisfree," expresses how he wishes to be away from the bustling city and somewhere peaceful by the lake. The speaker longs to have that soothing calmness that being in nature with the lake brings him. Yeats also used imagery to create a vivid image in the mind of the reader, the reader almost can feel it too. In Yeats poem, "When You Are Old" the self is also the main focus. This poem expresses the negative feeling of a rejected love. The love is gone and he hides his sadness among the people, like Arnold hides his sadness in the ocean.

Imagery was the main literary device that the poems also shared. Each poem was able to paint a picture in the mind of the reader and provide further medium to have the reader understand them. In Frosts', "The Road Not Taken," The speaker describes what the two roads look like, the reader can surely imagine what a picture of the that may look like.