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The Darkling Thrush
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...
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The Darkling Thrush
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...
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The Darkling Thrush
The speaker's state of mind in this poem is described as "fervourless," or lacking in any kind of enthusiasm for the world around him. He sees the wintry world around him as reflective of this...
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The Darkling Thrush
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...
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The Darkling Thrush
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...
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The Darkling Thrush
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...
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The Darkling Thrush
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...
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The Darkling Thrush
Pessimism: The mood of pessimism is introduced by a description of the weather as spectre-grey, the sun as weak, the end of winter as dregs, and the stems as strings of broken musical instruments....
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The Darkling Thrush
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...
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The Darkling Thrush
Thomas Hardy's morose poem about the turn of the twentieth century employs a bleak and wintry landscape as a metaphor for the death of the nineteenth century and personification of the end of the...
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The Darkling Thrush
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...
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The Darkling Thrush
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...
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The Darkling Thrush
The thrush and the poet are the only living things in this otherwise dead landscape. The poem emphasises for both their innermost being: for the bird it refers to his'soul' and for Hardy it refers...
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The Darkling Thrush
"The Darkling Thrush" is a nature poem by Thomas Hardy, and its subject is the titular bird which raises the narrator's spirits through its singing. The narrator speaks of a frost-bitten landscape,...
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The Darkling Thrush
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...
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The Darkling Thrush
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...
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The Darkling Thrush
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...
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The Darkling Thrush
Remember when everyone was excited and anxious about the “Y2K” or the change from the twentieth to the twenty-first century. In 1899, Thomas Hardy felt the same way when the end of the...
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The Darkling Thrush
Thomas Hardy uses the thrush in his poem "The Darkling Thrush" to signify the appearance of hope in an otherwise gloomy and harsh environment. "The Darkling Thrush" is all about Hardy's...
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The Darkling Thrush
Imagery is descriptive language that is used to create a picture in a person’s head. This includes both figurative language and sensory details. One way that style is used for meaning is through...
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The Darkling Thrush
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...
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The Darkling Thrush
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...
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The Darkling Thrush
'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'...
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The Darkling Thrush
Thomas Hardy's poem "The Darkling Thrush" is a bleak poem that uses the stark winter as a metaphor for the end of the 1800s and the hopeful, melodic song of a single thrush as a symbol of the...
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The Darkling Thrush
This is perhaps one of Hardy's most well-known poems. It describes the speaker of the poem looking out across a barren, wooden landscape on one cold evening in winter. The sudden hopeful song of an...
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The Darkling Thrush
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...
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The Darkling Thrush
This poem was written at the beginning of the 20th century to mark the end of the old century and beginning of the new. I will briefly summarize it by stanza. I was outside leaning on a gate on a...
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The Darkling Thrush
In his poem, "The Darkling Thrush," Thomas Hardy employs a rather strict form of traditional meter and rhyme and structural parallels to contain the disorder of the landscape that the speaker...
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The Darkling Thrush
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...
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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...
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The Darkling Thrush
Thomas Hardy shows many attributes of the typical English Nature poet in his poem "The Darkling Thrush." He encapsulates reflection, worries and concerns about Man and his place in the world by...
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The Darkling Thrush
I would suggest that the theme of order and chaos is embedded in Hardy's poems through a couple of ways. One such way is in the structure of the poem. The poem's structure is in a conventional...
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The Darkling Thrush
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...
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The Darkling Thrush
'The Darkling Thrush', one of Hardy’s best-known poems, epitomizes several features that are common to his vast body of poetry. The first generalization that we can make about Hardy’s poetry,...
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The Darkling Thrush
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,...
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The Darkling Thrush
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...
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The Darkling Thrush
It is December 31, 1899. The dawn of a new century is just on the other side of this night. Thomas Hardy sets the scene by examining an aspect of nature which can be unwelcoming but also hopeful....
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The Darkling Thrush
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...
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The Darkling Thrush
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...
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The Darkling 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...
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The Darkling Thrush
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,...
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The Darkling Thrush
The best thing to do for you to gain a good level of knowledge of this poem is to go through it with a dictionary and try and paraphrase it yourself. This will really help you to understand it in a...
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The Darkling Thrush
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...
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The Darkling Thrush
The first has come from the direction of town and asks shelter from the rain. He dries off by the hearth but is evasive when asked about himself. Although he enjoys smoking, he has neither pipe,...
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The Darkling Thrush
I leant upon a coppice gate When Frost was spectre-gray,And Winter's dregs made desolate The weakening eye of day. To get an emotional feel for the tone of the poem, try reading the four...
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The Darkling Thrush
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...
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The Darkling Thrush
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...
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The Darkling Thrush
Hardy's "The Darkling Thrush" was intended as a poem on the death of the old century—the nineteenth. Certainly, there are gloomy elements within it, with the initial few stanzas describing the...
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The Darkling Thrush
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...
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The Darkling Thrush
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...
