Refrain: Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night

"Do not go gentle into that good night"
"Rage, rage against the dying of the light."

The central theme of the poem is the resistance of death.This is reflected through the two the two refrains that appear throughout the poems which I quoted above. The speaker is urging the reader to strive to hold of death. He is not implying that death is a bad thing. He refers to it as the "good night". However, he says that without a fight and without trying to make all the difference that one can before he or she must die makes death a "dying of the light". Wise men, good men, and adventurous men all know this to be true. Therefore, they strive to hold off death for as long as they can. They know that they have not reached enough, served enough, or done enough to die yet, and they want to hold off death as long as they can so that they can accomplish these things. Specifically, the poem is addressed to the speaker's father, and he is urging him to do the same thing. The father is going blind, but the son says this doesn't make him useless, for "blind eyes could blaze like meteors and be gay". His father could be happy regardless rather than downtrodden. And though death is approaching his father, he says that he must rage against it like the wise, good, and adventurous men because there is still much left for him to do. However, this poem also subtly hints at the speakers sadness about the passing of his father. Maybe it's more the speaker who would miss his father after he had died than him actually believing that there is still a mission in life for him.