Written during the transition between the nineteenth and twentieth century, Hardy’s The Darkling Thrush portrays a cold and aging land; plangent and tentative in tone and sprit, boasting little hope.

The poem is presented in four octet stanzas and written in the iambic tetrameter with many of the lines using enjambment , giving it a steady rhythm which, when combined with Hardy’s choice of rhyme, creates a lyricism perhaps not dissimilar to the thrush’s song.  Throughout the poem too, one could argue a strong relation to music. Normally used to portray happiness, Hardy instead uses it to show the melancholy of the narrator’s situation; tangled bine-stems are compared to “strings of broken lyres” while the thrush’s song, filled with “joy illimited”, is soon counteracted when we acknowledge the singer to be “aged…frail, gaunt and small”. One could assume Hardy is saying any joy that exists of present belongs to a time gone by; the thrush with his joyous song, a tiny glimmer of hope amidst the doom, is soon to pass away like the nineteenth century. 

This, when considered with the date in which the poem was written, suggests a key theme to be the passing of time; the personification in “the weakening eye of day” therefore standing for the end of the century drawing nigh. This paradox, the idea of something living being used to refer to death, is particularly effective when we consider how many ‘living’ traditions came to an end through the introduction of the industrial world in the nineteenth century. The use of natural language – “coppice”, “germ and birth”, “bleak twigs”- further adds to this idea particularly when Hardy refers to natural objects dying. He could be commenting on the death of a passion and vitality he felt present in the more pastoral age of the earlier nineteenth century.

The use of such a paradox occurs again in his referral to the “Century’s corpse outleant…his crypt the cloudy canopy”. The century thus becomes the barren landscape, a dead memory. In the first stanza, Hardy uses language that suggests exhaustion or lagging for example “weakening” which, in the second stanza turns to death, there is no suggestion of a tired world, simply a “fervourless” one being laid to its “crypt”.

The subtle mention of human beings as “spirits” contributes further to the ghostly tone; all that is living is somewhat haunted, the land covered in the “spectre-gray” frost and the thrush deciding to “fling his soul”. The imagery of death suggests that the end of the century is the end of the world and using this continuing hyperbole (the end of the century will not bring about the end of the world) the reader is shown an intense fear on the part of the speaker.

Hardy’s use of ‘coinaged’ language, or words that don’t technically exist, is particularly interesting. The inclusion of “outleant” and the compounded “blast-beruffled” for example ensure Hardy’s rhythm is upkept and, although not commonplace words, they are easily understandable so detract nothing from the reader’s comprehension of the poem. Carefully chosen pockets of alliteration are used too, the words “Century’s corpse”, “cloudy canopy” and “growing gloom”, key ideas from the poem, resonate in the reader’s mind after the poem is finished through this simple technique.

To highlight particular words again, Hardy also uses capital letters. The words “Frost”, “Winter” and “Century” are given an almost human quality as though that is their given Christian name. One could argue again these three words are key ideas Hardy wants us to remember, frost and winter bring death just as the century’s end does in the eye of the narrator, though a more probable idea is that Hardy has personified these words and the capital letters simply add to the effect. Towards the end of the poem, when “some blessed Hope” is spoken of which the thrush is aware and the speaker is not, religious connotations could be hazarded upon. The capital ‘H’ suggests a reference to the capital ‘G’ in God. Many other religious connotations in the poem occur, the narrator comments that there is nothing in “terrestrial things” that could have brought the thrush so much joy for example. The joy therefore appears to be God, the bird has faith while the narrator doesn’t know where to find it. Language like “carolings” and “blessed” in relation to the bird’s music further support this.

In conclusion, Hardy is awaiting the new century with fear. His references to death suggest a longing of something which no longer exists, perhaps pastoral society suggested by the use of nature in his language. The bird represents a hope, religion, still heard but failing and dying with the start of the new century.