ROUGH draft

Ever since mankind came across the ability to communicate with one another there has been some form of recording or documentation of that ability, whether it was paintings on the insides of caves, drawings on the dried hides of animals, or books and novels. But since the beginning of these documentations literature and writing always have had a cloud of controversy hanging over it. Granted that the controversy surrounding these authors varied from time to time were for different reasons it still made writers of such professions very unpopular. But one way writers were able to have freedom of speech yet not be criticized was to write using symbolism and allegories. By using this technique it allowed writers to have freedom of speech without the fear of heavy criticism, and also allowed for a “deeper level” of thinking which has become very popular in today’s literature. In other words, authors could freely write pieces that said one thing, but that would mean something entirely different. In the poems by Dylan Thomas and Carl Sandburg both authors use negative thematic categories, such as anger and hate, to express emotions that can be entirely different from what the meaning might be perceived as.

What the poem “Hate” by Carl Sandburg is about is a friend killing another friend with the last words being “I’d give you the shirt off my back”. In the beginning the reader is not aware that they are friends, and it continues to say that the killer cried and looked back in sorrow on the killing, stating “It was a shot in one second of hate out of ten years of love”. The twist that Sandburg throws in though comes in at the very last words of the poem ending in, “I’d give you the shirt off my back …And I’ll kill you if my head goes wrong”. What makes this writing so unique is that it is a message within a message. Yes this poem could have the literal point of view such as a man accidently killing his friend, but what Sandburg is really trying to say here is the importance of our actions. That one wrong on even unintentional action can have a great impact in future years. For example in the poem if that man would have restrained himself from taking his friends life at the one late sorrowful second, they could have continued to be friends and possibly changed each other’s lives. Sandburg was totally aware of exactly everything thing in his poem and how the reader would perceive it.

The interesting part of “Do not go gentle into that good night” by Dylan Thomas is that it is obvious that Thomas did not literally mean “Rage, rage against the dying of the light”. That is not in discussion. What is in discussion though is what does it mean to “rage”? Does it mean to never quit and give up? Does it mean fight against the killing of good? Or does it have a totally different meaning for us then it did for Thomas’ time and culture that he wrote in? The real answer is that we will never know for sure, but what we do know is that Thomas is no fool. He knew that what he was writing could be viewed in multiple of number of ways and he did it on purpose, the only problem is that we don’t what way.