Death and Meaning in Dylan Thomas and Emily Dickinson

Introduction: Two Poems, Two Views of Death

In many ways, Dylan Thomas's "Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night" and Emily Dickinson's "Because I Could Not Stop for Death" are ideal texts to consider when examining human anxiety regarding death, dying, and the longing for permanence, because they make vastly different points in strikingly similar ways. That is to say, while they share some elements of form, style, and topic, the commentary each offers on the subject could not be more different. As its title suggests, Thomas's poem is a vocal entreaty to struggle for every bit of life in the face of impermanence, while Dickinson's poem takes a decidedly relaxed approach to the concept of death, viewing it as a transition into immortality rather than a fall into obscurity and darkness.

However, despite their nearly oppositional statements regarding death, one can actually view the two poems as a synthesis of humanity's own contradictory views on the subject. By examining the two poems in conjunction with each other, it becomes clear that both the acceptance and the refusal of death are born out of the same human need to generate meaning from the finite experience of a seemingly infinite universe.

At the most basic level, all human meaning is born out of narrative, simply because human beings experience time in a linear fashion, and as a result all meaning comes from the linking of one event to the next. Thus, "narratives are the way in which humans make sense of the world, including its peoples, institutions, and myriad individuals" (Young, 2001, p. 275). This is true not only of language and culture, but also of individual experience, because even the concept of the "self" depends on creating an internal narrative of past experiences (Young, 2001, pp. 275–76).

Narrative, Meaning, and the Fear of Death

As a result, birth and death occupy special places within human beings' personal narratives, because they mark the points at which the individual cannot affect his or her own story. Although people may be aware of what came before their birth and could likely predict some of what comes after their death, these events nevertheless place hard limits on the extent of any individual's personal, experienced narrative. Furthermore, because death is the event that has not yet happened, and all evidence indicates that everything constituting a person—memory, personality—ends with the body's shutdown, this event is viewed with particular apprehension, mystery, and fear. Even if there is some sort of afterlife, the living have no access to it, and so for all practical purposes death means the end of the story, at least for the person living it.

Humans have largely reacted to this fact in one of two ways—ways that, while different, are not mutually exclusive (as will be seen in the discussion of Thomas and Dickinson). On the one hand, the finality of death and the "meaninglessness" that follows it has encouraged people to hold it off for as long as possible, attempting to prolong life and thus wring as much meaning from it as possible before the body shuts down and the internal narrative that is consciousness disappears. This view makes obvious sense: if death means the end of consciousness and experience, it is only logical to want to get the most out of life, effectively "getting one's money's worth," as much as that metaphor can apply to human existence.

The other option is essentially an attempt to "cheat" death by ensuring the survival of one's legacy, so that the end of one's internal narrative need not mean the end of one's story, so long as that story survives—whether in the minds of others or in permanent structures left behind, such as gravestones and monuments. As the reader can likely guess, the first position is exemplified by Thomas's poem, while the latter is expressed by Dickinson's. While the two positions are oppositional in that one depends on a kind of antagonism toward death and the other on an acceptance of it, they can also be complementary, and examining the two poems helps demonstrate how these positions have shaped human conceptions of death.

Even before discussing the content of either poem, one may note their formal and stylistic similarities. Both poems are six stanzas long with relatively few lines per stanza (four per stanza in Dickinson and three per stanza in Thomas, except for the last, which features four lines). Although Thomas adheres to a strict ABAB rhyme scheme and Dickinson deploys no obvious rhyme, the poems nevertheless share a similar rhythm owing to their comparable structure. In addition, both depend on images of human activity contrasted against the backdrop of nature, and in particular use the movement of the sun as a means of describing the ending of a life.

Formal and Stylistic Similarities

Thomas's use of the sun is much more obvious, because the central image of his poem is the setting sun and the end of the day—to the point that the final line of every stanza references either "the dying of the light" or "that good night." This depiction of the setting sun and advancing darkness is reinforced by references to other natural phenomena, such as lightning, the waves of "a green bay," and blazing meteors. In each case, human action is presented as small and insignificant in the face of nature's indomitable progress toward night. Wise men resist the coming of death precisely because "their words had forked no lightning," while good men cry because "their frail deeds" are insignificant in the face of the constant motion of the waves. Even the "wild men who caught and sang the sun in flight" learned "too late" that they were grieving "it on its way," and blazing meteors are the image to which "grave men, near death" aspire, as if their dying eyes could exhibit a burst of fire before closing forever. Thomas uses this language of nature to simultaneously demonstrate the insignificance of human action in the face of the wider world while dramatizing the coming darkness, in which even the sun, lightning, meteors, and waves will simply cease to shine.

Dickinson also uses nature imagery in her poem, but in a slightly different way. Human activity is still contrasted against the movements of nature, but the contrast is not a negative one; the indifference of nature actually highlights the meaning of human action. As the narrator rides with Death "And Immortality," their carriage passes a school with children playing, before moving on to "the Fields of Gazing Grain" and "the Setting Sun." The playing children serve as a dramatic counterpoint to the passage into death, but arguably more important is the way Death's carriage moves from the children to fields of grain and finally to the setting sun. Although at first glance it might appear that the narrator and the poem are retreating away from human activity so that it fades into nothingness, the opposite is actually the case: the poem seems to value human activity and its aftermath more than anything else, even the movements of nature.

Conclusion: Opposing Views, Shared Anxieties

Gilliland, D. (2009). Textual scruples and Dickinson's "uncertain certainty." The Emily Dickinson Journal, 18(2), 38–62, 101.

Thomas, D. (2012). Do not go gentle into that good night. Retrieved from http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/15377

Westphal, J. (1994). Thomas's do not go gentle into that good night. The Explicator, 52(2), 113–115.

Young, D. A. (2001). The mortal blessings of narrative: Death, poetry, and the beginnings of cultural change. Philosophy Today, 45(3), 275–285.