This paper compares two celebrated elegies — Ben Jonson's "On My First Sonne" (1616) and Dylan Thomas's "Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night" (1951) — as expressions of grief, love, and the struggle to cope with mortality. The paper examines how each poet uses metaphor, religious allusion, and emotional progression to articulate his response to loss: Jonson mourning a son already dead, Thomas pleading with a dying father to fight for life. Through close reading of both poems, the paper demonstrates how poetic form and figurative language serve as timeless vehicles for processing profound emotional pain.
The paper demonstrates textual explication — the practice of unpacking a poem's meaning line by line, identifying literary devices such as allusion, metaphor, and tone shift, and connecting those devices to the speaker's emotional state. This technique is well-suited to literary analysis essays at the undergraduate level.
The essay opens with a broad framing statement about poetry and grief, then moves through a four-part structural analysis of Jonson's poem (acceptance, anger, envy, resolution) before pivoting to Thomas. The Thomas section focuses on his urging of his father to resist death and culminates in a close reading of the poem's ambiguous final plea. A brief conclusion ties both poems together thematically through their shared use of personal metaphor.
Throughout time, poetry has allowed countless poets to express their emotions and beliefs regarding love, loss, nature, and a multitude of other philosophical questions about themselves and the world around them. A comparison of Ben Jonson's poem On My First Sonne and Dylan Thomas's poem "Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night" demonstrates the timeless ability of poetry to serve as a vehicle for emotional expression and as a means of coping with loss.
Written in 1616, Jonson's On My First Sonne details the impact that the death of his son had upon him. Although only twelve lines in length, the poem can be divided into four distinct sections. In the first section, Jonson addresses how much he loved his son and how important his son was to him. Jonson writes:
"Farewell, thou child of my right hand, and joy; / My sin was too much hope of thee, lov'd boy. / Seven years thou wert lent to me, and I thee pay, / Exacted by thy fate, on the just day" (lines 1–4).
Jonson admits that he had too many hopes for his son and regards those hopes as one of his greatest sins. In this opening section, Jonson uses allusion to infuse the poem with his religious beliefs, though he does not explicitly deploy conventional religious symbols. He believes that his son was lent to him by God for a mere seven years before being called back to the heavens, and that nothing could have prevented his son's death, as it was "[e]xacted by thy fate" (line 4).
The poem then transitions to anger and confusion as Jonson attempts to come to terms with his loss. He wishes he could rid himself of fatherly attachment, yet recognizes that he was blessed to be a father at all, writing, "Oh, I could lose all father now! For why / Will man lament the state he should envy?" (lines 5–6). His lament over "the state he should envy" can also be read as envy of death itself, because death allows a person to escape the "world's and flesh's rage, / and if no other misery, yet age!" (lines 7–8). Jonson's fluctuating emotions are most apparent here, as he confesses to feelings of envy alongside a sense of being constantly battered by rage and misery.
In this concluding section, Jonson reinforces his love for his departed son by referring to him as "his best piece of poetry," thereby creating a connection between two of his greatest passions — family and poetry. By comparing his son to poetry, Jonson implies that his son was not only his greatest achievement and accomplishment but also someone he considered to be perfect.
Dylan Thomas's 1951 poem "Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night," like Jonson's poem, is an elegy addressed to someone he loves — his father — but unlike Jonson's poem, it was written before his father had actually died, which allows Thomas to express his fears directly to the man for whom the poem was written. Thomas urges his father to fight to live, a stark contrast to Jonson's momentary longing for death as an escape from the "world's and flesh's rage" (Jonson, line 7). Thomas writes, "Old age should burn and rave at close of day," imploring his father to fight against "the dying of the light," a metaphor for a person's transition through life into death (Thomas, lines 2–3).
Thomas then proceeds to list different types of men who, though different in many respects, each fight against the inevitable. These men include "wise men [who] at their end know dark is right," "[g]ood men, the last wave by, crying how bright / Their frail deeds might have danced in a green bay," "[w]ild men who caught and sang the sun in flight," and "[g]rave men, near death, who see with blinding sight" (lines 4, 7–8, 10, 13). In a sense, each of these figures — all of whom have fought to live as long as possible — serves as a metaphor for the man Thomas believes his father to be. It is evident that Thomas idolizes his father; he writes, "And you, my father, there on the sad height," as though his father stands on a pedestal Thomas himself will never be able to reach (line 16).
Jonson and Thomas are able to express their emotions of pain, loss, and fear through their poetry and to allow their readers to comprehend their states of mind at the time the poems were written. Each poet uses metaphors drawn from what he values most — poetry itself, in Jonson's case, and the various qualities of men, in Thomas's — to articulate the depth of his feelings: the irreversible loss of a son and the imminent loss of a father. In doing so, both poets create works that remain timelessly resonant in their depiction of human grief.
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