Thomas Hardy

1840-1928
The Darkling Thrush
1900
 Outline
 Introduction
 Summary
 Themes
 Form and Style
 Some examples of Figures of Speech
 Introduction
• Thomas Hardy; a novelist and poet
• His first novel The Poor Man and the Lady
went unpublished
• Famous novels: Under the Greenwood Tree, Far from
the Madding Crowd, Tess of the d’Urbervilles: A Pure
Woman Faithfully Presented, Jude the Obscure, etc.
• Unsuccessful in novel
• His loss of faith led him to the pessimism that
permeated his fiction and poetry
 Introduction
• Devoted himself to poetry
• Wessex Poems and Other Verses 1898, Poems of
the Past and the Present 1901
• By the time of his death he became
internationally famous. People came from
around the world to visit him
 Introduction
• The Darkling Thrush: an elegiac gloomy poem
• Originally subtitled “By the Century’s Deathbed”
• Written on the eve of the new century(20th C)
• Setting: Dusk, winter, a melancholy and dark
tone, last moments in 1899
• As most of his writings, The Darkling Thrush
embodies Hardy’s fatalistic and pessimistic views
of events
Untimely Bird
Appears in
a Winter
evening,
instead of a
Spring day
 The Darkling Thrush
Stanza 1
I leant upon a coppice gate
When frost was spectre-grey,
And Winter’s dregs made desolate
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.
 Stanza 2

The ancient pulse germ and birth

Was shrunken hard and dry,
And every spirit upon earth
Seemed fervourless as I
 Stanza 3
At once a voice arouse among
The bleak twigs overhead
In a full-hearted even song
Of joy illimited;
An aged thrush, frail, gaunt, and small,
In blast-beruffled plume,
Had chosen thus to fling his soul
Upon the growing gloom.
 Stanza 4
So little cause for carolings
Of such ecstatic sound
Was written on terrestrial things
Afar or nigh around,
That I could think there trembled through
His happy good-night air
Some blessed hope, whereof he knew
And I was unaware
 themes

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 Themes

Chaos and Order

Style and Form
Figures of speech
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