Love and Lit
The father-son relationship is a special bond, perhaps more special and strong than any bond in nature. When a father has a son, he is so proud of him as he knows his son will hopefully one day carry the family name and keep it going. Fathers look forward to teaching their sons the ways of men, and this quality time that a father and son spend together is something that a young boy could probably not share to the same extent with anybody else. So when a boy or man loses his father, it is not something that a son can take in stride. It is a step back for a man and it puts everything in perspective as he knows that now it is he who bears the family name. In Dylan Thomas' poem "Do not go gentle into that good night" we see a man who, distraught by the oncoming death of his father wishes that his father would fight to live more and not give up.
English: Title page of Ben Jonson's 1616 folio edi...
Theodore Roethke
English: Madonna in the infamous black corset duri...The recurring lines "Do not go gentle into that good night" and "Rage, rage against the dying of the light" sum up the love that Thomas truly feels for his father. He is perhaps so ashambles that he is even denial that his father's death is eminent and so is denying it, telling his father to almost "suck it up". He can't bear to see his father like this because this is not his father as he knows him. His father may have been a strong man, and this is not what Thomas sees. Thomas sees a broken down man and is trying to conjure up his father's energy into being the strong man he once was so that he may be with him longer. He parallels...