Dylan Thomas's poem "Do Not Go Gentle into that Good Night" is written in a
poetry structure called a villanelle. In the Renaissance
period, a villanella, called a villancico in Spanish and a villanelle in
French, was an Italian and Spanish dance-song. As a
dance-song, a villanelle has a very specific structure; a villanelle also
typically contains pastoral or rural themes.
First, a villanelle has a 19-line structure, as we can see in
Thomas's poem. Second a villanelle, like a sonnet, is also written in iambic
pentameter. A line of iambic pentameter is made up of
5 feet, also called iambs. An iamb is made up of two
syllables, a short syllable followed by a long syllable; we can also call such
syllables unstressed and stressed. Another way to phrase this is that a line of
iambic pentameter follows a da-DUM da-DUM da-DUM da-DUM da-DUM pattern. Hence,
as we can see, a line of iambic pentameter will contain a total of 10
syllables broken into 5 feet.
We can see an example of iambic pentameter in the very first line of Thomas's
poem:
Do not go gentle into that good night
In the above, words in boldface represent the
stressed syllables, showing us that the line contains a total
of 5 feet and 10 syllables, making it a perfect example of iambic
pentameter.
To continue discovering the number of feet, we can first multiply the 5
feet in each line by the number of lines, which is
19, to get 95 feet. We can then verify this number by
continuing to count the number of syllables in each line, which should be 10.
Counting is a good idea because there can always be some variations in meter.
We see one variation in the following line of the 5th stanza,
which has 11 syllables:
Blind eyes could blaze like meteors and be gay
However, it is possible to compress the three-syllable word
meteors into two syllables when speaking it, which would still be
consistent with our iambic pentameter, as follows:
Blind eyes could blaze like
mete-ors and be gay.
Hence, as we can, the total of feet in the poem is 95.
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