Thursday, October 14, 2010

Do not go gentle into that good night; I dare you to move.

"Villanelle" sounds like... a female villain. Bellatrix Lestrange.

Anyway, that's the pattern at work here--villanelle form. It's five three-line stanzas followed by a sixth four-line stanza, and the last line alternates and repeats, but the last stanza has both of them.

Also, there's some assonance in the second line of the poem, I think, which stuck out to me for some reason. "Old age should burn and rave at close of day." Oh... also, villanelles seem to have rhyming second lines in each stanza, and the first and last lines in the stanzas also rhyme. That's elaborate.

The poem itself is, I think, the speaker imploring a person not to die. "That good night" is a euphemism, then, for death, and "dying of the light" would be the same. The last stanza implies that the speaker is asking his father not to die, which is probably important.

That's quite a bit of figurative language (Q11), really.

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