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Thomas Hardy
After three stanzas describing relentless hopelessness in a blighted landscape of death, desolation and "winter's dregs," the poet hears the sound of a thrush singing. The aged bird is "caroling"...
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Thomas Hardy
Imagery throughout the first three stanzas of the poem creates feelings of sadness. In stanza one, words like "spectre," "grey," "desolate," "weakening," and "broken lyre" create sadness by...
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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...
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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
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
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...
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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
'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
The poem as a whole is concerned with the continual nature of life in the midst of hardship, whether that be physical or mental. The narrator comments on the cold, gray frost that covers the...
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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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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...
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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
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 tone of the first two verses is very pessimistic. Does the thrush and its song provide a more uplifting message however? In the first verse Hardy writes 'Winter's dregs made desolate / The...
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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
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 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
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 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
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
In the first stanza of "The Darkling Thrush," the "dregs" are the least valuable part of something, the sediment or grounds left at the bottom of a liquid. A common phrase is "the dregs of society"...
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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
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
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 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...
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The Darkling Thrush
It is the end of the year, in the sason of winter when the landscape looks bleak.In the 1st part of the poem the landscape is described as a hopeless and gloomy one.There is noting bright,...
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The Darkling Thrush
(a) They provide an important chance to evaluate the world in a decisive way. Poetry, above all else, is an experience. As such, there is always something of one's own experience that the reader...
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The Darkling Thrush
Thomas Hardy's poem, The Darkling Thrush, is written in hymn meter, i.e. alternating lines of iambic tetrameter and iambic trimeter rhymed ABAB. This sound device contributes to the religious...
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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
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
Let us remember that Hardy wrote this poem at the very end of the nineteenth century, and as a result was contemplating what the new century would bring. Such significant endings are always key...
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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
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
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...
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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
The landscape is what T.S. Eliot would discribe as a "linguistic objective correlative" of the poet's mood. It's very difficult to accurately describe an emotion -- we cannot directly apprehend the...
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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 spiritual state of the speaker in this excellent poem is emphasised by the bleakness of the landscape which her surveys. Images of darkness, bleakness and desolation abound in the first two...
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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
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
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
Known as the "good, gray poet," Thomas Hardy wrestled with his religious beliefs and his notion of the Immanent Will, the blind force which drives the universe more through indifference and caprice...
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The Darkling Thrush
Well, I would say that a major focus in Thomas Hardy's poem "The Darkling Thrush" is joy. Amid the misery, cold and damp of a British winter at the dying of the century, a cold, aged little bird...