The Darkling Thrush

Thomas Hardy evokes a bleak and wintry mood through imagery in the poem's opening stanza as the speaker observes that "Frost was spectre-grey," and he stood amidst "Winter's dregs." The harvest is...

The dominant theme of Thomas Hardy's work, both prose and verse, is pessimism. Hardy sees not so much a hostile outside world but one of randomness and unpredictability which nevertheless foil...

Because of its themes of renewal, life in darkness, and finding joy when circumstances seem dire, "The Darkling Thrush" contains many examples of powerful and expressive imagery. One good example...

In order to understand what Hardy is talking about in these lines you mention, you should look at the stanza as a whole. In this stanza, the poet is talking about how everything seems to be dead....

More despair than hope, in my opinion. Although the hope encapsulated in the song of the thrush is clearly important, I think that it is all but drowned out by the patent despair in the...

The speaker of the poem is worried about the dawning of a new era. He's comfortable with all the old certainties of the 19th century, and he doesn't feel particularly enthusiastic about what lies...

The three generalizations of Thomas Hardy's poems are: 1. The Beauty of Creation Thomas Hardy conveys this in his poem entitled, “Beeny Cliff.” He talks of the “opal and the sapphire of that...

While the phrase explicitly refers to the thrush, a case could be made that it also refers to the poem's author, and by extension the entire field of poetry and literature. In the poem, the...

The speaker describes a blighted, "fervourless," wintry landscape, hard, bleak, and gray. The setting mirrors the broken, hopeless feeling in his own soul. This landscape seems to the speaker to...

There are two major themes of nature in the poem. The first is represented by the narrator's gloom in seeing the cold earth and dead vegetation. There seems to be no life at all, and the entire...

It is difficult to overstate how traumatic the Victorian era was for so many and how much the very basic assumptions of life had changed during the nineteenth century. Hardy in particular was...

Hardy’s poem, written in 1900, is a lament to the end of the seventeenth century. The central metaphor is most clearly identified in the second stanza: The land's sharp features seemed to be The...

'The Darkling Thrush' is like much Victorian poetry in terms of style, content, and purpose, and taps into some specifically late Victorian themes. Like much Victorian poetry,' The Darkling Thrush'...

The speaker of the poem is outside, describing the desolate winter landscape. He focuses on the barren and cold aspects as they symbolize a general despondency that the speaker feels at the end of...

Most of the symbolism in the poem is aimed towards the finding of hope in seemingly dire circumstances. The idea is that there is no place where life will not be renewed, even if the whole world...

The speaker leans on a gate opening into the woods. The season is winter and the atmosphere and climate are a "spectre-grey." There is a grey color, possibly to the sky and the frost itself, and it...

The first thing you need to cover in a critical appreciation of the poem 'The Darkling Thrush' by the poet Thomas Hardy is the poetic form, including both meter and rhyme scheme. The meter of the...

Remember Y2K in the year 2000. Everyone was afraid of what would happen when the old century changed to another. No would fly on an airplane and people gathered supplies in case everything shut...

There is a definite sense in which Hardy, in this poem, is writing about more than simply his own feelings at the turn of the century and the point of transition between the Victorian era and the...

This poem can be looked at as an optimistic poem. The opening stanza depicts a desolate and cold world that we live in. Hardy uses words like "corpse" and "crypt" to compare...

Hardy's poem depicts an atmosphere of pessimism as he stands at the edge of a "coppice" facing a desolate landscape towards the end of winter. While "all of mankind" is comfortable together beside...

In the poem "The Darkling Thrush" by Thomas Hardy, the poet creates feelings of sadness in several ways, including the season, the time of day, the weather, the setting, the imagery, specific word...

In the poem 'The Darkling Thrush' by Thomas Hardy, the poet starts his piece by putting us in the setting where he had his ideas. He is leaning on the gate to a small, managed wood in England's...

Well, I'd suggest that one of the critical elements that you see in poetry (which is certainly the case here) is the connection between imagery and thematic content, bound together through the use...

Hardy wrote the poem just a couple of days before the beginning of what, for many people, would've been the official start of the twentieth century. (Indeed, the poem was originally entitled "The...

Although the poem was written in 1900, literally at the very end of the 19th century and therefore at the century's deathbed, Hardy probably thought better of such a depressing and relatively...

To be honest, it is the differences between the thrush and the poet that is the point of this excellent poem. However, both the thrush and the speaker are presented as being alone in an otherwise...

As a Naturalist, Thomas Hardy employs nature to convey both mood for his works and to convey the Naturalistic indifference of the universe. For instance, his poem entitled "Neutral Tones" he and...

Hardy's poem presents a mood of desolation and despair evoked by the symbolic ends of day, year, and century. His contrast between this desolation and the apparently unlimited joy of the thrush's...

There is no question that both poems of Hardy, "The Darkling Thrush" and "Ah, Are you Digging My Grave" are typical of the poetic ventures of Hardy into frustration and defeat against a blind,...

"The Darkling Thrush" was first published in 1900 and was originally entitled "The Century's End, 1900." At the turn of the twentieth century, there was much pessimism in Victorian poetry, in part...

Thomas Hardy creates a bleak, unforgiving landscape in the first stanza of "The Darkling Thrush" through imagery and diction. The first stanza captures the bleak and gloomy mood of the landscape by...

Allusion is a literary technique using specific language to refer to something else of significance, either directly or indirectly. In the phrase indicated, the narrator is using religious language...

Thomas Hardy's poem "The Darkling Thrush" was originally titled "By the Century's Deathbed." Hardy may have written the poem in 1899, as an annotation on the poem's manuscript suggests, but the...

Thomas Hardy’s sad but lovely poem, “The Darkling Thrush,” was written in 1899 on the eve of a new century. This is not extraneous information since the poem’s speaker points to the passage of...

The thrush in Hardy's poem is singing cheerfully, taking no cognizance of the bleak weather and the winter chill: At once a voice arose among The bleak twigs overhead In a full-hearted evensong Of...

As a large metaphor for the changing attitudes of the turn of the century (19th to 20th), Thomas Hardy chose the song of “an aged thrush” in the evening light, puffing himself up and singing in...

Stanza three of Thomas Hardy's "The Darkling Thrush" marks a break from the first two stanzas' tone of patent despair. Suddenly, In a full-hearted evensong Of joy illimited; An aged thrush,...

There are different emotional experiences that Hardy goes through in "The Darkling Thrush." One example of how he communicates his feelings occurs when he describes the scene of bleakness that is...

Hardy uses images of a gray and desolate winter landscape to show that death is anything but comforting. This landscape, which represents death, is full of unpleasant images: it is gray, it is like...

Hardy capitalises several nouns throughout the poem: ‘Frost’(2) and ‘Winter’(3) in the first stanza, ‘Century’s’(10) in the second, and ‘Hope’(31) in the final stanza. He does this to emphasise...

The view from the coppice gate is so depressing because it is a dreary winter day in the late afternoon (the speaker refers to this time as the "weakening eye of day") as the sun is beginning to go...

In this poem by Thomas Hardy, the poet makes use of a pathetic fallacy to evoke the depressive mood. A pathetic fallacy personifies nature to imbue it with the mood or emotions the writer wishes to...

Thomas Hardy's poem "The Darkling Thrush" describes a very bleak atmosphere where the speaker, Hardy, uses very dark imagery to paint a picture for the reader. The words used to describe the...

One aspect of the style of this poem is the extensive use that Hardy makes of personification in the way he bestows human qualities on the landscape. This is achieved in a number of different...

THe speaker's weariness in the Poem mirrors Hardy's own. Hardy constantly wrote about his despair for humanities future. THis is represented in the poem by the speaker's search for meaning. Hardy...

I agree with what lit24 and want to add a few more items addressing the second part of your question, on the themes in Hardy's poem "The Darkling Thrush." I write "themes," not "theme," because...

This poem by Thomas Hardy, perhaps better known as a novelist, is in abab eight line stanzas, giving it a lyrical tone and musical beat, not unlike a thrush’s song in the wilderness. The images of...

The speaker in the poem is melancholic and "fervourless." He "leans upon a coppice gate" as the sun sets ("The weakening eye of day") and ponders the century that's almost over, as well as the...

Thomas Hardy loved his life and home in Dorset County, England where he grew to be the literary giant of his time both as a novelist and a poet. His prolific works span both the romantic and...