How do you describe the character(s) in "Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night," with textual support.

There are two characters in "Do Not Go Gentle into That
Good Night" by Dylan Thomas, the speaker and the dying man. The speaker is the son and
the dying man is his father ("And you, my father, there on that sad height"). The
speaker makes reference to four kinds of men, one in each of the four interior stanzas
of the six stanza iambic pentameter poem in a repeating aba aba rhyme scheme, varied in
the last stanza with abaa.

The four kinds of men, who are
not characters in (meaning actors in) the poem are (1) "wise men," (2) "Good men," (3)
"Wild men," and (4) "Grave men." The speaker tells how each has an epiphany of truth or
error, such as "Good men" who realize "how bright" their good deeds "might have danced"
somewhere other than where they were ("in a green bay") or the "Grave men" who realize
they might have been equally grave ("meteors" suggests grave in astronomical research)
and yet been happy ("gay"). Yet these men do not participate at all in the brief
narrative of the poem and so cannot be described as
characters.

The speaker maybe described as ardent, perhaps
even desperate; intelligent; philosophical; impassioned; and deeply devoted in love to
his dying father. The ardent fervor of his verse, especially the repeated end lines,
"Rage, rage, against the dying of the light" and "Do not go gentle into that good
night," which itself is a repetition of the opening line, show he is desperate in making
his impassioned appeal for his father to fight off the last closing light of life, to
hold strongly to the light of life as ferociously as might be, despite his failures and
inadequacies, similar though they may be to the four
men's.

He can be described as intelligent and philosophical
because of his examples of the four kinds of men, who are used with great effect. They
make his point that despite the "frail deeds" that "forked no lightning" and the songs
"for the sun in flight" that were but grief for "it on its way" and the "Blind eyes
[that] could blaze like meteors and be gay," his dying father should not yield to giving
up the "rage against” death and should “not go gentle into that" dark night of death--a
night that Thomas ironically and stoically styles as a "good
night."

The father is a passive character and as such can
only be described as a reflection of what the son says. It seems from the son's words
that the father has yielded to the weight of his failures and loses and is quietly
awaiting his expected sorrowful end. It would seem from the example of the four kinds of
men that the father has in some ways been a disappointment to himself and is thus
judging himself at the end of his life and passing a verdict against himself that it is
best that he leave the light of the "sun in flight" and pass "gentle into that good
night.” The speaker's deeply devoted love for his father can be seen in the earnestness
with which he pleads with his father to recognize that his faults and failures are the
same as others’ and to fight in "rage against the dying of the
light."