When talking about both Shakespeare’s and Dylan Thomas’s poems, Sonnet 73 and Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night respectively, death is the main point of conversation. The speaker of both poems is addressing a person about death; however in Sonnet 73 death is accepted, whereas in Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night death is unacceptable.

In Sonnet 73, Shakespeare is writing to a man, to which we are unsure of his relationship with Shakespeare, about an inevitable death. The poem is broken up into three quartets and a heroic couplet. The first three quartets show a progression from a long period of time to shorter period of time. For example, the first describes late fall and winter, the second describes a night, and the third describes a fire. The reason Shakespeare uses these three in comparison with each other is because the first two, a season and a night, are times in which it is implied that there will always be more. However, the last one, a fire, dies once it has burned out and thus it is not implied that there will always be more (McMann). Shakespeare does this to establish that the “fire” is a metaphor for life, and that the “ashes” is a metaphor for death. From this connection we can understand that the poem is indeed about death. Now that we know that it is about death, the heroic couplet plays greater meaning. In the couplet, Shakespeare writes “This thou perceiv’st, which makes thy love more strong. To love that well which thou must leave ere long.” Here Shakespeare is saying that we should accept death for what it is, but by doing so, this makes the world around us more beautiful because we can appreciate things that we won’t have for much longer. Death is perceived much differently in Dylan Thomas’s poem.

In Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night, Thomas is addressing his father and his father’s fight against cancer. Unlike Shakespeare, Thomas doesn’t see death as something one should embrace. In fact, Thomas sees death as something that should be fought off for another day. We see this directly just by Thomas’s use of the refrain in his poem, “Rage, rage against the dying of the light,” or, “Do not go gentle into that good night.” This repeating of such strong, emotional phrases shows that Thomas fears for his father and is pleading his to fight it off.