Do Not Go Gentle to That Good Night by Dylan Thomas Essay

Dylan Thomas was a well-known poet and writer whose poems were very famous, such as â€Å"And Death Shall Have No Dominion† and â€Å"The Play for Voice.† He was born on 27 October 1914, and he died on 9 November 1953. He was very popular in his lifetime, and he is still known by his works after his death. One of his works that I think is the most significant poem is â€Å"Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night.† This work had been published about two years before his death – 1951, and it is also a part of the collection In Country Sleep. Dylan used the poem to express his feeling while his father was losing health and strength, encouraging his father to hold on to life. The theme of this poem is death. At the first line of the poem, â€Å"Do not go gentle into that good night,† he wants to tell the unknown listeners not to go into that good night. We can easily find a poetic device of metaphor when he used the word night for death. We also have an extended metaphor in which day is life and night is death. The first line is also the title of the poem, repeated four times throughout the poem. The next two lines are â€Å"Old age should burn and rave at close of day/ Rage, rage against the dying of the light.† In the second line, we can see what the poet wants to show us about how the elderly should fight death with their remaining health. In addition, when he says â€Å"Rage, rage against the dying of the light,† he wants to clearly confirm that this is the processing of the age – the death of old age. The first stanza is the thesis statement of the poem about aging and death. The first line of second stanza â€Å"Though wise men at their end know dark is right,† the metaphor of darkness is continually used; dark represents death. The meaning of this sentence is the clever men think that we are all going to die – it’s totally a natural process. However, at the second line â€Å"Because their words had forked no lighting they / Do not go gentle into that good night.† This sentence has an implication. The â€Å"word† in this line is the action of the clever people. The poet shows the unknown listener that though the clever men know that the death of aging is natural, they still try to fight it; they â€Å"do not go gentle to that good night.† This idea is continually developed in the next two stanzas: â€Å"The wild men who caught and sang the sun in flight grieved it on its way† and â€Å"the grave men who see with blinding sight.† They still fight against the dying of light – the death of aging. In the final stanza, â€Å"And you, my father, there on the sad height,† we know the unknown listener is the poet’s father, and he is dying. The poet by this poem, tries to beg and encourage his father to fight against the â€Å"dying of the light.† The speaker ends the poem by two lines: â€Å"Do not go gentle to that good night / Rage, rage against the dying of the light.† These are also the two lines that were repeated throughout the poem. This poem is one of the famous poems in Dylan Thomas’s collection. The poem not only is an encouragement that tells us not give up but fight against the dying of aging, but also he wants to tell his father not go to the darkness – â€Å"Do not go gentle to the good night†. Work Cite Shmoop Editorial Team. â€Å"Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night: Stanza 6 Summary† Shmoop.com. Shmoop University, Inc., 11 Nov. 2008. Web. 5 Feb. 2013

Learning & Cognitive theories Essay

Learning in my life is an ongoing process; one that carries on as I come across various situations, every single one of them increasing my learning experience. It is rightly said that learning starts the day one is born and continues till one’s death bed. So in this respect there have been various stimuli that have repeatedly crossed my life. I have made several associations with different kinds of objects or situations for that matter which I have remembered and used to make various inferences. Who does not remember the jingles of the ice cream man, stimulating and beckoning the kids to crave for ice cream and inquire for money from the parents? Out of the many situations, one that has truly left an indelible impression on my mind is a childhood recollection of the horrific car accident that I went through with my family. Although I came out unscathed from the accident as did my family who just suffered minor injuries, the very thought of screeches of a car just triggers a whole array of thoughts and nightmares of my accident ordeal. It was a fine day with no unusual surroundings or conditions of the highway. Our car was also going at a steady pace maintaining the speed limits. The car was functioning well with every smallest detail of the car scrutinized by my father, a perfectionist at work. But as it happened that the heavy truck two cars in front of ours carrying logs of wood, its lock that fastened the logs broke free from its bolt which sent the logs tumbling down. This is what I last remembered out of my flashbulb memory, besides the incessant screeches and the wails of the people struck by this horrific incident. It is from that moment onwards that I shudder at the slightest screech of a car so much so that I cannot even stand my friends drifting their modified cars, much to their surprise and disgust. Such a fear that I have developed is largely due to that horrific incident that I went through. This has set a feeling or a sensation at the back of my mind about staying away from fast cars on the roads. I can attribute my fear to the concept of classical conditioning wherein an unconditioned stimulus (screech of a car) has turned into a conditioned stimulus. That conditioned stimulus sets off a conditioned response (fear of an accident). The concept of classical conditioning says exactly that learning is associated with a person responding to a neutral stimulus which normally does not bring about that response. So more often that not whenever I come across and hear a screech I relate it with a fear that somebody will have an accident. If I had not experienced that accident, such a screech of a car would not have meant anything abnormal or out of the ordinary. Such a behavior of mine can also be explained by the concept operant conditioning where a person learns a voluntary response and the extent of it is strengthened or weakened depending on its positive or negative consequences. In my accident scenario, the accident is a negative consequence which I associate with a screech of a car. So the screech or a high speed develops the fear and reinforces it as well. Such reinforcement may happen if somebody in my family also has an accident on a highway or I myself get into an accident. The reinforcement has also stemmed from media which has also done a sufficient bit to sustain my fear of car accidents. One can usually see in the car chases in the movies where the bad guys being chased by the cops or police in their cars get into accidents and get busted. There are several other instances where certain programs reinforce my fear of speeding and screeching cars like the reality car shows. They show cars getting into horrific and deadly accidents as the drivers over speed their vehicles. There is another approach to learning which is called cognitive social learning. One such learning is latent learning. In this type of learning a new behavior does not get registered properly though it is acquired till one receives reinforcement encouraging one to adopt or develop a behavior. But in my accident scenario, I can largely put it down to classical conditioning. This is where I have started making associations with certain stimuli which in turn leads to the development of fear. Reference ATHERTON J S (2005) Learning and Teaching: Cognitive theories of learning http://www. learningandteaching. info/learning/cognitive. htm Accessed: 2 February 2009 Frietas, S & Neumann, T. (2009). The use of exploratory learning for supporting immersive learning in virtual environments. Computers & Education Moriyama, J & Kato, Y. (2009) Self-efficacy and learning experience of information education: in case of junior high school. AI & Society