Poetry Analysis Paper discussing the theme in Thomas Hardy's The Darkling Thrush - Essay Example

Although Thomas Hardy’s poem “The Darkling Thrush” seems at first to be very dark and forbidding, the note of hope at the end denies this impression and seems instead brighter because of the gloom that has preceded it, making it seem as though Hardy had visions of a better future when he wrote this poem. The first stanza contains a great deal of dark imagery that bring to mind the conception of death. The author introduces himself as leaning on a gate, immediately introducing the concept of weakness or fatigue even as he brings in the concept of a change occurring, he is about to pass into or out of something, which is signified by the gate itself.

The concern of weakness is reinforced as he brings in images of death in the ghost-like Frost and the desolate, weakening eye of day. Instead of painting a brilliant sunset to celebrate this final day of the old century, Hardy indicates that the ‘dregs’ of Winter, the last bits of tea leaves or other material left in a cup after most of the liquid has been drunk, have dirtied the water of this sunset. It is welcome to go and it has been wanting to go for a long time. The bare branches take on a skeletal form as they score the sky and the broken strings of the instruments indicate that even such joyous things as poetry and music have been broken in this old century.

“It is as if poetry itself is broken, music itself is out of tune. The very landscape has becomes the pinched face of a corpse withered in death” (Stallings, 2006). Even the people have become ghosts, not only not visible in the poem, but described as beings that have ‘haunted.’ The second stanza does little to alleviate this oppressive sense of death and decay. Here, Hardy describes the century as a corpse already. Everything is described in terms of a funeral: “His crypt the cloudy canopy, / The wind his death-lament” (10-11).

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