Comparing Dylan Thomas' poem Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night and John Milton's poem When I Consider How My Light is SpentPoem Dylan Thomas's "Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night" and John Milton's poem "When I Consider How My Light is Spent" were written during difficult times in their respective poet's lives. Thomas was dealing with the loss of his father; Milton was on the verge of going completely blind at the age of forty-three. As each poet struggles to cope with the crisis that arises in his life, he makes a statement about the relationship between humanity and God, the reasons why God gives and then withdraws certain gifts, and the right way to live life . Thomas and Milton arrived at contrasting answers to these fundamental questions about life. The poets' use of personal events in their lives as subject matter and their use of the personal pronouns "I" and "my" resolve possible issues of voice in both poems. . Because Thomas directly refers to "my father" (line 6) and Milton opens his poem with the line "When I consider how my light is spent" (1), the reader can, with some basic knowledge of the story of each poem, It can reasonably be assumed that the poet and the speaker are interchangeable. Thomas and Milton chose to share their private thoughts on extremely personal subjects with the world through their poems. By drawing on their own experiences, poets give these works a tone that resonates with the reader because they can connect the words of the poem to their own lives. Thomas and Milton present contrasting views of the relationship between humanity and God. or the inevitable events of life. Thomas believes that humans have a certain degree of control; his father may not be able to live forever, but... middle of paper ... different men at very different times in history, but both poets were grappling with difficult situations and trying to decide how they should react. Although their final conclusions are completely opposite, the raw emotion behind each poem resonates with the reader whether the poem is 45 or 345 years old. The human struggle to understand life, regret, and why God gives and withholds certain gifts will continue as long as humanity exists; each person who thinks about these questions will come to their own personal conclusions, just as Thomas and Milton did. Works Cited: Milton, John. “When I consider how my light is spent.” The Longman Anthology of British Literature: Compact Edition. Ed. David Damrosch. New York: Longman, 2000. Thomas, Dylan. “Don’t go easy on that good night.” Literature and ourselves. Addison-Wesley Educational Publishers, 1997.