What is the theme of death in the first two stanzas of "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 convey. The scene described is in the "dead" of winter, and the poet describes the features of the evening in terms of death. The first stanza hints at death relatively subtly. Ghosts are suggested by the terms "spectre-grey" and "haunted." The "strings of broken lyres" that score the sky suggest ancient angelic harps that have fallen into disrepair.

In the second stanza, more overt death imagery is evident. Looking across the landscape before him, the speaker imagines a body laid out. This could be the undulations of low hills that seem to form the silhouette of a corpse. The poet, writing in 1899—the final days of the nineteenth century—identifies this landscape-corpse as belonging to the expiring 1900s. The low-hanging gray clouds become "his crypt," and the sound of the wintry wind serves as a funeral dirge or mourner's wail. During the depths of winter, spring seems but a distant memory, as the poet acknowledges by describing the "ancient pulse of germ and birth" as "shrunken hard and dry." Any sign of new life is shriveled like death due to winter's grip.

In the first two stanzas of "The Darkling Thrush," Harding uses a pathetic fallacy and metaphors related to death to create a somber, depressive, and even eerie mood.

How does Hardy address the theme of death in "The Darkling Thrush"?

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 a "strings of broken lyres," it is "shrunken," and without spirit. Death is seen as relentlessly desolate and unfortunate. It seems to offer no prospect of a joyful afterlife.

Then the speaker hears a brave thrush singing amid this landscape of gray and hopeless barrenness. There is "joy" in his song, as if the thrush has

chosen thus to fling his soul
Upon the growing gloom.

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 century with the "corpse":

The land's sharp features seemed to be
The Century's corpse [the dead body of the 19th century] outleant,
His crypt [grave] the cloudy canopy,
The wind his death-lament.

Clearly, Hardy's despair and pessimism pervades his poem as in line two he describes the Frost as "spectre-gray"; however, the artfulness of the verse offsets this gloom.  For the poet becomes grateful to the aged thrush for its "full-hearted evensong./Of joy illimited."  The frail and aged thrush has chosen

...thus to fling his soul
Upon the growing gloom.

In the midst of the death of the century, the intrepid little thrush comes, to sing bravely in protest and in "Some blessed Hope" for the new century.