How three poets use literary devices to convey generational perspectives

¶ … Generation-Based Perspectives in 3 of the Poems Are Similar

Dylan Thomas, Linda Pastan, and Elizabeth Bishop all include one common generational-based perspective within each of their poems. They all focus on relationships between members of the older and younger generations and all deal with the reality of death. The one major similarity shared by all three poems is that they all portray how younger individuals, unlike the older ones, have little to no understanding about the experience of death and its consequences.

The poem "Go gentle" by Linda Pastan is similar in certain ways to Dylan Thomas' "Do not go gentle into that good night." Both poems touch upon the relationship between two individuals of different generations. The individuals from the older generation are fathers to the younger individuals, who in both poems are the narrators themselves. Also in both poems the narrators are witnesses to their fathers being slowly taken away by death.

The father in Thomas' poem continuously agonizes over his imminent death, which he has not accepted the reality of yet. This can be seen when Thomas states that the father is "there on a sad height" who is told by the narrator to "curse, bless, me now with your fierce tears, I pray." In Pastan's poem the narrator also witnesses the father agonizing over his imminent death; this is apparent when she states, "you have grown wings of pain and flap around the bed like a wounded gull..."

Also in both poems the narrators try to advise their fathers on what to do as regards death. In witnessing his father's agony on his deathbed, the narrator urges his father to prolong life as much as possible by not easily giving up his struggle against death. In the last stanza, through the use of lines repetitively used throughout the poem, the narrator urges his father "do not go gentle into that good night. Rage, rage against the dying of the light." Thomas depicts death metaphorically as being the "good night" and the "dying of the light."

While the narrator in Thomas' poem urges his father to resist death, the narrator in Pastan's poem wishes to advise her father to give up his struggle against it by saying, "father let go, and death will hold you up." Both poems show that the younger individuals, in being distant observers of death, cannot easily relate to those actually experiencing it.

The poem "Sestina" by Elizabeth Bishop also depicts two individuals of different generations; the older individual is the grandmother while the younger one is a child. The allusion to death becomes apparent when it is understood that the loss of a loved one has taken place. This loss is revealed after the child holds up a drawing of a "man with buttons like tears," which causes the grandmother to secretly shed tears of sorrow. This poem makes it most apparent how younger individuals often cannot relate to the experience of death and its consequences like older ones can.

Throughout the poem the child is completely unaware about the grandmother's sorrowful loss; this is due in part to the grandmother trying hard to hide how she really feels by "laughing and talking to hide her tears." After the child shows her the drawing, the grandmother tries to distract herself, "but secretly, while the grandmother busies herself about the stove, the little moons fall down like tears..."