The poem tells the listener not to accept death passively. It uses imagery of night representing death and urges one to "rage, rage against the dying of the light." Wise men know death is inevitable but shouldn't just accept it if they haven't achieved their full potential. Earlier generations cry out at the end of their lives about deeds left undone. Wild, lively men celebrate life but learn too late that it is fleeting. Even when nearing death, one should continue fighting against their impending demise.

1. See the Leaves that Fall from Trees
See the leaves that fall from trees
Watch them fall to ground with grace
Carried by the winds of nature
They never stay in just one place
See the leaves that fall from trees
They grow from branches nice and quick
A season’s when they live their life
Full and short poisoned sick
See the leaves that fall from trees
The venom that we always share
We eradicate our mother nature
And the life that flows through air
See the leaves that fall from trees
They now shrivel up and fall
Don’t even let them their last breath
Grounded, lifeless no beauty at all
Now see the future of our kind
Our greed has brought us to our knees
We have condemned all forms of life
And drank the water of the seas
We have no second earth to hide
We had the cure to our disease
We need not much but open eyes
To see the leaves that fall from trees

2. Let me die a youngman’s death
Let me die a youngman's death
not a clean and inbetween
the sheets holywater death
not a famous-last-words
peaceful out of breath death
When I'm 73
and in constant good tumour
may I be mown down at dawn
by a bright red sports car
on my way home
from an allnight party
Or when I'm 91
with silver hair
and sitting in a barber's chair
may rival gangsters
with hamfisted tommyguns burst in
and give me a short back and insides
Or when I'm 104
and banned from the Cavern
may my mistress
catching me in bed with her daughter
and fearing for her son
cut me up into little pieces
and throw away every piece but one

3. Let me die a youngman's death
not a free from sin tiptoe in
candle wax and waning death
not a curtains drawn by angels borne
'what a nice way to go' death
DO NOT GO GENTLE INTO
THAT GOOD NIGHT
Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should burn and rage at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
Though wise men at their end know dark is right,
Because their words had forked no lightning they
Do not go gentle into that good night.
Good men, the last wave by, crying how bright
Their frail deeds might have danced in a green bay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
Wild men who caught and sang the sun in flight,
And learn, too late, they grieved it on its way,
Do not go gentle into that good night.
Grave men, near death, who see with blinding sight
Blind eyes could blaze like meteors and be gay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
And you, my father, there on the sad height,
Curse, bless me now with your fierce tears, I pray.
Do not go gentle into that good night.
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

4. Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
The speaker addresses an unknown listener, telling him not to "go gentle
into that good night."
At first this is a puzzling metaphor but, by the end of line 3, we realize
that the speaker is using night as a metaphor for death: the span of one
day could represent a man's lifetime, which makes the sunset his
approaching demise.
"That good night" is renamed at the end of line 2 as the "close of day,"
and at the end of line 3 as "the dying of the light." It's probably not an
accident that the metaphor for death keeps getting repeated at the
end of the lines, either. Or that the two rhyming words that begin the
poem are "night" and "day."
So what does the speaker want to tell us about death? Well, he thinks
that old men shouldn't die peacefully or just slip easily away from this
life. Instead, they should "burn and rave," struggling with a fiery intensity.
The word "rave" in line 2 connects with the repeated "rage" at the
beginning of line 3, uniting anger, power, madness, and frustration in a
whirlwind of emotion. Oh, yeah, it's going to be one of those poems.
Get ready to feel.
Though wise men at their end know dark is right,
Because their words had forked no lightning they
Do not go gentle into that good night.
These lines are potentially quite confusing, so let's start by untangling
the syntax of Thomas's sentence here: even though smart people know
death is inevitable (line 4), they don't just accept it and let themselves
fade away (line 6), because they may not have achieved everything
they were capable of yet (line 5).

5. The metaphor of night as death continues here, with death figured as
the "dark." The speaker admits that sensible, smart people realize death
– traveling into "the dark" – is inevitable and appropriate. After all, we're
all going to die, and it's a totally natural process.
But even though clever people know they're going to die, they don't
simply accept it. They don't take the news lying down.
Why not? The speaker tells us that it's because "their words had forked
no lightning" (line 5). This image is puzzling and open to several
interpretations.
Here's ours: the "words" represent the actions, the speech, or maybe the
artistic creation of intelligent people. You know, the way this poem
consists of Dylan Thomas's own "words."
These words don't fork lightning, which means they don't split and divert
the massive electrical shock of the lightning bolt, which draws it toward
themselves like a lightning rod instead. Even though the "wise men"
have put everything they can into their "words," those words weren't
attractive enough to make the lightning split.
Basically, they haven't really made much of a mark on the world.
The bright electric current of the lightning bolt adds a new twist to the
light/dark and day/night metaphors, suggesting that really living life is
more like getting zapped by an electric shock than like feeling the
gentle radiation of the sun.
This stanza also begins to conflate – or collapse together – people in
general, such as the person the speaker is addressing with poets and
artists like the speaker himself.
As the poem continues, we'll see more and more connections between
great men and great artists. These connections imply that artistic
expression is a more concentrated version of life in a broader sense.
You know, the way a can of lemonade concentrate tastes way more
lemon-y than the lemonade itself once you add water.

6. Good men, the last wave by, crying how bright
Their frail deeds might have danced in a green bay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
Once again, the best way to understand how all these poetic images
work together is to untangle Thomas's sentences, which are all twisted
up so that they fit the meter and form of the villanelle.
The basic parts of this sentence are the subject, "Good men" (line 7),
and the verb, "Rage" (line9). In the speaker's opinion, true goodness
consists of fighting the inevitability of death with all your might: "Good
men […] Rage, rage against the dying of the light."
Next, Thomas adds an image of the ocean waves; the most recent
generation of good men, the "last wave by" (line 7), are about to crash
against the shore, or die.
As they approach death, these men shout out how great their actions
could've been if they'd been allowed to live longer.
Or, to use the metaphor in the poem, as their wave crashes against the
rocks, the men shout how beautifully that wave could have danced in
the bay if it could've stayed out at sea instead of rolling onto the
beach.
So this generation is like a wave, death is like the breaking of the wave
on the shore, the sea is like life, and the dancing waters in the ocean
are like beautiful actions.
The bay is "green" because the sea is really brimming with life – plants,
seaweed, algae, you name it.
In this image, being out at sea is like life and coming back to the barren
shore is death –the opposite of the metaphor you might expect, in
which drifting out to sea would be like death.
Notice that Thomas describes the good men's potential future actions –
the things they won't be able to do because they have to die – as "frail
deeds." It's not clear whether the men or the actions are weakened by
age; perhaps both.

7. Wild men who caught and sang the sun in flight,
And learn, too late, they grieved it on its way,
Do not go gentle into that good night.
The speaker describes another kind of men – those who don't allow
themselves to fade quietly away into death, "Wild men" (line 10).
What sort of men are we talking about? The kind who captured the
world around them in their imagination and celebrated it – "who
caught and sang the sun in flight" (line 11) – only to discover that the
world they celebrated was slowly dissolving around them as comrades
age and die.
Here the sun represents the beauty that exists in the mortal world, and
its "flight" across the sky represents the lifespan of people living in this
world.
"Flight" also suggests that it moves rapidly – our lives are just the blink of
an eye.
So just when you think you're partying to celebrate birth and life,
symbolized by the sunrise, you find out that you're actually mourning
death, symbolized by the sunset.
Grave men, near death, who see with blinding sight
Blind eyes could blaze like meteors and be gay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
The speaker describes the way that "Grave men" fight their impending
death.
Notice the pun on "grave," which could either mean that the men are
very serious, or that they are dying.
These serious dying guys realize that, even though they are weak and
losing their faculty of sight, they can still use what strength they have to
rage against death.
So, even though their eyes are going blind, these men can "see,"
metaphorically speaking, with an overwhelming certainty or "blinding

8. sight," that they still have a lot of power over the way they die, even if
not the timing.
Instead of getting snuffed like candles, they can "blaze like meteors"
(line 14). They're planning to go out with a bang.
And you, my father, there on the sad height,
Curse, bless, me now with your fierce tears, I pray.
Do not go gentle into that good night.
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
In the last lines of the poem, the speaker turns to addressing his father.
His father is on the verge of death, which the speaker describes as a
"sad height."
We think this is probably an allusion to looking down into the Biblical
valley of death; the metaphorical mountain where the father stands is
the edge of the mortal world.
The speaker begs his father to cry passionately, which will be both a
blessing and a curse. After all, the father's death is heartbreaking. But if
he battles against the odds, it might also be heroic.
The speaker ends with the two lines that are repeated throughout the
poem, asking or instructing his father not to submit to death – instead,
he should rant and rave and fight it every step of the way.

9. The Jaguar
The apes yawn and adore their fleas in the sun.
The parrots shriek as if they were on fire, or strut
Like cheap tarts to attract the stroller with the nut.
Fatigued with indolence, tiger and lion
Lie still as the sun. The boa-constrictor’s coil
Is a fossil. Cage after cage seems empty, or
Stinks of sleepers from the breathing straw.
It might be painted on a nursery wall.
But who runs like the rest past these arrives
At a cage where the crowd stands, stares, mesmerized,
As a child at a dream, at a jaguar hurrying enraged
Through prison darkness after the drills of his eyes
On a short fierce fuse. Not in boredom—
The eye satisfied to be blind in fire,
By the bang of blood in the brain deaf the ear—
He spins from the bars, but there’s no cage to him
More than to the visionary his cell:

10. His stride is wildernesses of freedom:
The world rolls under the long thrust of his heel.
Over the cage floor the horizons come.
The Jaguar Poetry Analysis
The poem ‘The Jaguar’ written by Ted Hughes describes the lifestyles of animals at a
zoo and their different attitudes to entrapment in their cage. It compares the bored,
lazy moods of the animals to the lively, adventurous mood of the jaguar, which does
not see this confinement as a way of stopping him behaving as if it were in its natural
environment. The poet’s clever use of techniques such as similes and metaphors
clearly puts an image in our minds of the animal’s ways of life and gives an accurate
interpretation of what we would normally see at a day at the zoo.
The poem describes the actions of the lazy, bored animals to the energetic mood of
the jaguar. The animals are in fact so lazy and bored that they are ‘fatigued with
indolence,’ in other words, their boredom exhausts them. They spend most of their
time sleeping, making it very uninteresting for the visitors to watch. It then talks about
the parrot, which ‘strut like cheap tarts’ to try and get some food from passers by.
The guests
Is this essay helpful? Join OPPapers to read more and access more than
550,000 just like it!
are unimpressed with the animals, until they reach the jaguar’s cage, where they
watch in amazement as the jaguar behaves as it would in the wild.
The supposed message is told through the jaguar escaping with its mind even though
it is trapped in the cage. It tells us that even though we may be in some sort of
physical confinement, we not have to stop us escaping with our minds, therefore
behaving as we would on the outside.
The mood starts off as being drowsy and depressing, when we hear about the
tiredness and boredom of the animals. There is a tone of sympathy felt for the

11. suffering of the animals. Later in the poem, the tone with the jaguar’s energy is quite
uplifting, with a lively and energetic mood to contrast the depressing mood from
before.
The poem is structured into five stanzas, each with four lines. These lines are about
equal in length. Sometimes a sentence is incomplete within a stanza, and then the
sentence is finished at the start of the next..
Mirror
I am silver and exact. I have no preconceptions.
What ever I see I swallow immediately
Just as it is, unmisted by love or dislike.
I am not cruel, only truthful---
The eye of a little god, four-cornered.
Most of the time I meditate on the opposite wall.
It is pink, with speckles. I have looked at it so long
I think it is a part of my heart. But it flickers.
Faces and darkness separate us over and over.
Now I am a lake. A woman bends over me,
Searching my reaches for what she really is.
Then she turns to those liars, the candles or the moon.
I see her back, and reflect it faithfully.
She rewards me with tears and an agitation of hands.
I am important to her. She comes and goes.
Each morning it is her face that replaces the darkness.
In me she has drowned a young girl, and in me an old woman
Rises toward her day after day, like a terrible fish.

12. The Mirror Analysis
I am silver and exact. I have no preconceptions. Whatever I see, I swallow
immediately Just as it is, unmisted by love or dislike. I am not cruel, only truthful
? The eye of a little god, four-cornered. Most of the time I meditate on the
opposite wall . It is pink, with speckles. I have looked at it so long I think it is a
partr of my heart. But it flickers. Faces and darkness separate us over and
over.
Now I am a lake. A woman bends over me, Searching my reaches for what
she really is. Then she turns to those liars, the candles or the moon. I see her
back, and reflect it faithfully. She rewards me with tears and an agitation of
hands. I am important to her. She comes and goes. Each morning it is her
face that replaces the darkness. In me she has drowned a young girl, and in
me an old woman Rises toward her day after day, like a terrible fish.
In Sylvia Plath's poem "Mirror," we are addressed by an inanimate object,
which sets out to define itself and its function and does so with the exactitude
that is a part of its nature. It has no preconceptions because it is without
memory or an ability to reason. It is omnivorous and swallows everything it
confronts without making judgments that might blur, mist or distort. It is god-
like in its objectivity and its incapability of emotional response. Most of the
time it meditates on the opposite wall faithfully reproducing its colors and
design until darkness supervenes or faces intrude. and these happenstances
recur with regularity.
In stanza two the mirror becomes a perfectly reflecting lake unruffled by any
disturbance. A woman bends over the lake like the mythological Narcissus,
but no matter how deeply she searches she sees only her actuality or surface
truth. Unlike Narcissus, the woman can not fall in love with what she sees. The
candles and moon to which the woman turns are liars capable of lending

13. untruthful shadows and romantic highlights, unlike the lake surface/mirror,
which renders only faithful images.
Unhappy with what she sees, the woman weeps and wrings her hands in
agitation. The youth and beauty once reflected during the person's morning
visits are now swallowed and drowned in the metaphorical depths of the
lake, and what slowly surfaces from those depths is the terrifying fact of aging,
so graphically rendered by the simile of a fish.
Metaphors
I'm a riddle in nine syllables, An elephant, a ponderous house, A melon
strolling on two tendrils. O red fruit, ivory, fine timbers! This loaf's big with its
yeasty rising. Money's new-minted in this fat purse. I'm a means, a stage, a
cow in calf. I've eaten a bag of green apples, Boarded the train there's no
getting off.
Sylvia Plath (1932-1963)
In "Metaphors" the poet or speaker of the poem holds up a different sort of
mirror to herself--one that allows full-length representation and subsurface
penetration. Just as the mirror of the first poem becomes metaphorically a
lake, the speaker here becomes a series of objects or creatures that reflect a
pregnant woman.
The term of a normal pregnancy is repeatedly reflected in the number of lines
in the poem and the number of syllables in each line. It is no accident that
the poem's title is a nine-letter word as are the words "syllables" that
concludes line one and "ponderous" in line two.
The riddle is easily solved. Forgive me for stating the obvious. The woman feels
elephantine because of her increased weight and girth. She's as big as a

14. clich'd house and her body has become an object in which a separate being
dwells. Her melon-shaped gravidity makes her legs seem by comparison like
slender tendrils. The red fruit is the fetus, the ivory (reminiscent of the earlier
elephant) perhaps the child's skin or the child's precious bones which are also
compared to fine timbers. The yeasty rising loaf is the commonly referred to
bun in the oven. The fat purse is the woman's belly stuffed with the precious
cargo of newly minted and still uncirculated money.
The woman feels she has lost her own identity in becoming a means for
reproduction or a stage on which a dramatic production is about to debut.
The green apples she ate have caused abdominal swelling demanding
release. The train is a metaphor for her pregnancy-a non-stop journey with a
destination bespeaking joy and relief.
Mid-Term Break by Seamus Heaney
I sat all morning in the college sick bay
Counting bells knelling classes to a close.
At two o'clock our neighbors drove me home.
In the porch I met my father crying--
He had always taken funerals in his stride--
And Big Jim Evans saying it was a hard blow.
The baby cooed and laughed and rocked the pram
When I came in, and I was embarrassed
By old men standing up to shake my hand
And tell me they were "sorry for my trouble,"
Whispers informed strangers I was the eldest,
Away at school, as my mother held my hand
In hers and coughed out angry tearless sighs.

15. At ten o'clock the ambulance arrived
With the corpse, stanched and bandaged by the nurses.
Next morning I went up into the room. Snowdrops
And candles soothed the bedside; I saw him
For the first time in six weeks. Paler now,
Wearing a poppy bruise on his left temple,
He lay in the four foot box as in his cot.
No gaudy scars, the bumper knocked him clear.
A four foot box, a foot for every year.
The poet, Seamus Heaney, begins the plainly titled poem, Mid-term Break,
with a simple, yet underlying melancholy tone. By the second verse, the
poignant theme is solidified when he meets his weeping father on the porch,
all the while, a neighbor, ''Big Jim Evans'' describing the accident as ''a hard
blow''. The setting's atmosphere is changed as ''the baby cooed and laughed
and rocked in the pram'' while the poet is being consoled by ''old men'' who
murmur to each other the fact that he is the eldest son. The mood does not
pick up, but the story moves along. "At ten o'clock the ambulance arrived
with the corpse" which had been restrained and bandaged by the nurses. As
if for his own nostalgic needs, the next morning, the poet enters his little
brother's room, and finds the surfaces littered with mourning candles. This is
the first time the poet sees his little brother in six weeks after being away at
college. "Wearing a poppy bruise on the left temple", the poet describes the
injury with a flower as innocent, beautiful and naive as the little boy himself.
"No gaudy scars, the bumper knocked him clear." The car had hit the little
boy, but did not produce any scars, leaving the boy looking peaceful and
with an untarnished, young body. "A four foot box, a foot for every year." The

16. poet's little four-year-old brother died after being hit by a car.
Considering that the poet had lost his younger brother, this poem is written in
a very straightforward manner. Being the eldest, he feels as if he must hold in
his feelings. Each verse has details about the people and the house, all with a
doleful mood. The details are extended and 'wordy', until the last two verses.
The last two verses are very short and are not as detailed as the rest of the
poem. This brings a feeling of 'sudden awareness of the situation' felt by the
author. The sudden alarm brings the poet to nearly speechlessness, leaving
the end of the poem with short phrases that really carry the load of the...