A Study Guide for Thomas Hardy's "The Darkling Thrush"

By Gale and Cengage

A Study Guide for Thomas Hardy's "The Darkling Thrush," excerpted from Gale's acclaimed Poetry for Students. This concise study guide includes plot summary; character analysis; author biography; study questions; historical context; suggestions for further reading; and much more. For any literature project, trust Poetry for Students for all of your research needs.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Cengage Learning - Gale
• Release date: Aug 26, 2016
• ISBN: 9781535836098

Book preview

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The Darkling Thrush

Thomas Hardy

1900

Introduction

Thomas Hardy's gloomy poem about the turn of the twentieth century, The Darkling Thrush, remains one of his most popular and anthologized lyrics. Written on the eve of the new century and first published in Graphic with the subtitle By the Century's Deathbed and then published in London Times on New Year's Day, 1901, the thirty-two-line poem uses a bleak and wintry landscape as a metaphor for the close of the nineteenth century and the joyful song of a solitary thrush as a symbolic image of the dawning century. Like much of Hardy's writing, The Darkling Thrush embodies the writer's despair and pessimism. This is partially offset, however, by the artfulness of the poem itself. Hardy was sixty years old when he penned the lyric, far past the life expectancy for a man of his time. A few years earlier he had stopped writing novels, after critics panned Jude the Obscure, and turned to writing poetry exclusively. The Darkling Thrush is included in his second volume of verse, Poems of the Past and the Present (1901), in the section Miscellaneous Poems, sandwiched between The Last Chrysanthemum and The Comet at Yell'ham, two other bleak poems of nature. Harper & Brothers published Poems