Pessimism in Thomas Hardy’s The Darkling Thrush Essay -- Darkling Thru

Pessimism in Thomas robusts The dark ThrushThomas Hardys writings are often imbued with pessimism, and his meter The Darkling Thrush is not an exception. Through the bleakness of the landscape, the narrators musings on the centurys finale, and the narrators reaction to the songbird, The Darkling Thrush reveals Hardys preoccupation with time, change, and remorse.Written in four octaves, A Darkling Thrush opens with a view of a desolate winter landscape. With spectre-grey frost covering everything in thought (line 2), all joyful colours and sounds are smo in that respectd with an intangible film of bleakness. This gloominess is not to be dispersed, for the imagery of Winters dregs suggests that there exists a residue of the years melancholy (3). The burden of the word dregs creates a caesura, and the heaviness of the poem is reinforced with alternating lines of iambic tetrameters and iambic trimeters. The tangled bine-stems that scored the sky (5) and the lands sharp features (9) move the miasmal pessimism to a more sharply defined pain that is intensified with the alliteration in his crypt the cloudy canopy (11). The bleak twigs overhead (18) cast a sharp image of bars stretching across the sky, embracing the gloominess in Hardys world. Reflecting the narrators sense of perceptions, the dreary landscape mirrors the narrators depression and projects his emotions into solid images. An occasional poem, A Darkling Thrush depicts the setting of one century and the birth of another through the narrators eyes. Leaning perhaps wearily on the coppice gate, the narrator observes how even the people that recourse the land like soulless wanderers (7) return to their homes where brightly shine their fires, a ... ...llest cause for hope. The thrushs exuberance seeps into the narrators support for a skeleton moment, revealing to him a life lived to the fullest, yet the narrator remains unconvinced and melancholy. Submerging The Darkling Thrush in a dreary landscape devoid of life and colour, Thomas Hardy is able to weave pessimism into his work, providing a core of bleak emotions for his narrator, who sees no hope for the empty society he lives in. Even when he catches a glimpse of cheerfulness from an old thrush, the narrator declares his personal plight excluded from the possible causes of joy. With all signs of hope criticized as being absurd, Thomas Hardys The Darkling Thrush conveys a purely pessimistic view.Work CitedHardy, Thomas, The Darkling Thrush. 1900. The Norton Anthology of English Literature. 7th ed. 2 vols. New York Norton, 2000. 2 1935-1936.