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Learn More. “The Darkling Thrush” is a poem by the English poet and novelist Thomas Hardy. The poem describes a desolate world, which the poem’s speaker takes as cause for despair and hopelessness.
- The Poem Title – ‘The Darkling Thrush’
- Analysis, Stanza by Stanza
- Poetic Form
- A Final Note
The title of a poem speaks volumes about it because, through it, the poem must convey the mood and tone of the poemin a very precise and economic way. For ‘The Darkling Thrush,’ Thomas Hardy chose a word with tremendous history in poetry. ‘Darkling’ means in darkness, or becoming dark, for Hardy can still see the landscape, and the sun is ‘weakenin...
Stanza One
In the first stanza, we are introduced to the poet, in the first person, ‘I’. He is leaning on a gate in a little wood – it’s traditionally a thinking pose, and the poem conveys his thoughts and feelings. The bitter hopelessness of a cold winter’s evening is stressed by the imagery: ‘Frost’, ‘spectre-gray’, ‘dregs’, desolate’, ‘weakening’, ‘broken’ and ‘haunted’ are unified and strengthened by their suggestions of cold, weakness, and death or ghostliness. There are plenty of heavy, gloomy ‘g’...
Stanza Two
The second stanza continues the model of the former if anything in even stronger terms. The whole past century is a ‘corpse’, the cloudy sky its tomb, and the winter wind like the century’s death song. The personificationof the century intensifies one’s feeling that it is a real presence. The imagery in this stanza continues and enlarges on the motif of death contained in the first. Despite the personal, subjective start of the poem, by the end of the second stanza, Hardy has made his mood an...
Stanza Three
In the third stanza, at the nadir of ‘The Darkling Thrush,’ the sudden hurling out of its song by a thrush might be seen as the injection of a rather fatuous optimism into the poem. The ‘full-hearted evensong/Of joy illimited’ is certainly a cause for hope. The choice of bird here is what makes Hardy one of the finest poets: He chooses an old, frail, thin, scruffy-looking thrush, not the nightingale of Miltonic and Romantic tradition. It is an ordinary indigenous song-thrush, but one that is...
The overall rhythm of ‘The Darkling Thrush’ is regular iambic tetrameter alternating with iambic trimeter (8 syllables in a line, with the second line in each case having just 6 syllables); it’s a ballad stanza rhythm. This regular rhythm seems to have a slow, joyless effect and makes the pace slow. The tight rhyming gives strength and authority to...
‘The Darkling Thrush’ is typical of Hardy’s work in that it shows life on Earth, human as well as animal, existing under the iron grip of an unsympathetic force, in this case, Nature. In praising defiance and the unconquerable spirit, it is also typical, and in its firm unwillingness to state a clear conclusion, balancing hope and pessimism, it cou...
The weakening eye of day. The tangled bine-stems scored the sky. Like strings of broken lyres, And all mankind that haunted nigh. Had sought their household fires. The land's sharp features seemed to be. The Century's corpse outleant, His crypt the cloudy canopy, The wind his death-lament.
Apr 25, 2023 · This article will share If I Knew Questions & Answers. This poem is written by Maud Wyman. In my previous posts, I have shared the questions & answers of Ice Cream Man, The Miller His Son and Their Donkey and The Rooks so, you can check these posts as well.
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Oct 2, 2014 · Here are 10 of the best question poems that give unexpected answers. How would you answer these same questions if the poem was yours?
Hello Children , I am Barsha and in this video I have discussed the exercise part of a Poem : Chapter 1 "If I knew" from your English Literature book : Fusi...
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