![]() quiet and soothing " a gentle voice" " a gentle nocturne".belonging to or characteristic of the nobility or aristocracy " an aristocratic family" " aristocratic Bostonians" " aristocratic government" " a blue family" " blue blood" " the blue- blooded aristocracy" " of gentle blood" " patrician landholders of the American South" " aristocratic bearing" " aristocratic features" " patrician tastes".soft and mild not harsh or stern or severe " a gentle reprimand" " a vein of gentle irony" " poked gentle fun at him".cause to be more favorably inclined gain the good will of " She managed to mollify the angry customer".Of good birth not rough, harsh, or severe, but placid, bland, and mild in manners not wild or refractory.having little impact " an easy pat on the shoulder" "gentle rain" " a gentle breeze" " a soft ( or light) tapping at the window".The maggot of the blue- bottle used as bait in angling.A compellative of respect, consideration, or conciliation as, gentle reader.Soft not violent or rough not strong, loud, or disturbing easy soothing pacific as, a gentle touch a gentle gallop.Not wild, turbulent, or refractory quiet and docile tame peaceable as, a gentle horse.Well- born of a good family or respectable birth, though not noble.Quiet and refined in manners not rough, harsh, or stern mild meek bland amiable tender as, a gentle nature, temper, or disposition a gentle manner a gentle address a gentle voice.cause to be more favorably inclined gain the good will of " She managed to mollify her angry boss".To make genteel to raise from the vulgar to ennoble.The rhymes, too, cleverly reflect Thomas’s desire that his father allow a little daylight into his darkest final hours: ‘night’ plays off ‘light’ in terms of rhyme and meaning, but ‘day’, sandwiched between them, semantically opposes ‘night’ (just as Thomas’s father is being asked to oppose its oppressions) before giving way to ‘light’.If you're looking for meanings of the word gentle, Such emphatic words convey the disordered rage which Thomas wants his father to allow to overcome him. ‘Rage, rage’ offers a nice example of the spondee (or heavy iamb, depending on your perspective on spondees), where two syllables are sounded with a similar amount of emphasis. It is that first stanza which shows Dylan Thomas’s way with vowels (and, for that matter, consonants) so wonderfully: ‘age’ and ‘rave’ play against each other with their long ‘a’ sounds, only to coalesce into ‘rage’ in the next line – decidedly apt, since the rage Thomas describes is a result of old age and, in Philip Larkin’s words, ‘the only end of age’. This shifts the poem between the two modes, between asking his father to put up one last fight against the terror of death, and talking of how ‘wise men’ and ‘wild men’ (among others) have provided an example to follow by their defiant actions, using their last breaths to contest their own annihilation. So although the poem opens with a clear command: ‘Do not go gentle …’ (and note Thomas’s irregular use of ‘gentle’ as an adverb: ‘gently’ would have been to smooth over the realities of dying all too gently), when the mantra recurs at the end of the second stanza it follows a run-on line describing wise men (‘they / Do not go gentle’), and so becomes indicative rather than imperative. This poetic form enables Thomas to use the title within the poem as both an instruction (or request) and a simple indicative statement. Auden’s ‘ If I Could Tell You’ and William Empson’s ‘ Missing Dates’. ![]() For other widely anthologised examples, see W. And a number of English poets – especially Anglophone poets, writing after, and partly against, the high moment of modernism – had a go at writing villanelles in the mid-twentieth century. (Indeed, it appears that Passerat invented the form himself with this poem). The villanelle, as the name of the verse form implies, has its origins in French poetry: the form dates back to a late sixteenth-century poem ‘Villanelle (J’ay perdu ma Tourterelle)’ by Jean Passerat, but it was in the twentieth century that it became a great English verse form. Both lines then conclude the sixth and final stanza of the poem by forming a rhyming couplet. So ‘Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night’, as well as providing the poem’s opening line, also concludes the second and fourth stanzas ‘Rage, rage against the dying of the light’ – its counter-refrain, if you will – concludes the first, third, and fifth stanzas. ‘Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night’: analysisĪs we mentioned at the beginning of this analysis, ‘Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night’ is a villanelle, a poem divided into a series of three-line stanzas where the same two repeated lines of verse comprise the last line of each alternating stanza.
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