Pessimism in Thomas Hardy’s The Darkling Thrush
Thomas Hardy’s writings are often imbued with pessimism, and his poem “The Darkling Thrush” is not an exception. Through the bleakness of the landscape, the narrator’s musings on the century’s finale, and the narrator’s reaction to the songbird, “The Darkling Thrush” reveals Hardy’s 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 sight (line 2), all joyful colours and sounds are smothered with an intangible film of bleakness. This gloominess is not to be dispersed, for the imagery of “Winter’s dregs” suggests that there exists a residue of the year’s 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 land’s 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 Hardy’s world. Reflecting the narrator’s sense of perceptions, the dreary landscape mirrors the narrator’s 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 narrator’s eyes. Leaning perhaps wearily on the coppice gate, the narrator observes how even the people that haunt the land like soulless wanderers (7) return to their homes where brightly shine their fires, a ...
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...llest cause for hope. The thrush’s exuberance seeps into the narrator’s life for a brief 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 Hardy’s “The Darkling Thrush” conveys a purely pessimistic view.
Work Cited
Hardy, Thomas, “The Darkling Thrush.” 1900. The Norton Anthology of English Literature. 7th ed. 2 vols. New York: Norton, 2000. 2: 1935-1936.
The timeline carries on chronologically, the intense imagery exaggerated to allow the poem to mimic childlike mannerisms. This, subjectively, lets the reader experience the adventure through the young speaker’s eyes. The personification of “sunset”, (5) “shutters”, (8) “shadows”, (19) and “lamplights” (10) makes the world appear alive and allows nothing to be a passing detail, very akin to a child’s imagination. The sunset, alive as it may seem, ordinarily depicts a euphemism for death, similar to the image of the “shutters closing like the eyelids”
“Men are from Mars, women are from Venus” as the famous saying of John Gray goes. It is believed men and women are nothing alike in almost every aspect. In Deborah Tannen’s essay “Gender in the classroom: Teacher’s Classroom Strategies Should Recognize that Men and Women Use Language Differently” she focused on how men and women differ when it comes to communicating, with emphasis on how it effects to how men and women behave in the classroom.
Frankenstein and his abominable creation are two characters inexorably linked with eachother, as father and son, as inventor and invention, and even as reflections of eachother. Their conflict deals with themes of the morality of science and the fears of child birth, and their characters are drawn from a wealth of experience and reading. Shelley’s doppleganger of mankind is like a twisted vision of reality; based in some sense on reality but wildly taken out of proportion, the monster is so inhuman that it cannot reconcile itself with its master or the world of humanity. Its tragic story serves as a warning of what mankind could become as well as a reflection of Shelley’s own personal demons, and her creation has changed the face of literature.
Let us begin at the end. A foreshadow, a flashback, they are the creative tools that Edgar Allen Poe (1809-1849) uses as we journey through the madness that is “The Tell Tale Heart (1843)”. We have no names to go by only ones perspective, a story narrated by a man who claims sanity in an insane situation. Here masked by denial; we are told an anecdote that is driven by love and hate, the most irrational emotions that we all know and feel. Poe demonstrates to us how these sensations can become twisted and malign. He uses these passions and the choices they drive us to, to show the extreme possibilities of human nature and its delicate equilibrium.
Storment, Suzanna. "Frankenstein: The Man and the Monster." Commentary page. October 2002. Washington State University. 8 April 2003. http://www.wsu.edu/~delahoyd/frank.comment3.html.
Romantic writer Mary Shelley’s gothic novel Frankenstein does indeed do a lot more than simply tell story, and in this case, horrify and frighten the reader. Through her careful and deliberate construction of characters as representations of certain dominant beliefs, Shelley supports a value system and way of life that challenges those that prevailed in the late eighteenth century during the ‘Age of Reason’. Thus the novel can be said to be challenging prevailant ideologies, of which the dominant society was constructed, and endorsing many of the alternative views and thoughts of the society. Shelley can be said to be influenced by her mothers early feminist views, her father’s radical challenges to society’s structure and her own, and indeed her husband’s views as Romantics. By considering these vital influences on the text, we can see that in Shelley’s construction of the meaning in Frankenstein she encourages a life led as a challenge to dominant views.
Lipking, Lawrence I, Stephen Greenblatt, and M H. Abrams. The Norton Anthology of English Literature: Volume 1c. New York: W.W. Norton & Co, 2006. Print.
More than just a spooky story, Shelley’s novel is rife with allusion, both literary (the Creature’s relationship with its creator closely resembles Satan relationship to God in Milton’s Paradise Lost), and mythological (the book’s subtitle, The Modern Prometheus, likens Dr. Victor Frankenstein to the mythic bringer of fire to mankind). Of course, nothing could have been expected of Mary Shelley, the daughter of a prominent philosopher and a feminist, raised to be an intelligent and educated woman. Despite a lack of critical support for her novel, Frankenstein found a home with everyday readers who appreciated its macabre atmosphere and the plight of the strangely sympathetic
Rumens, Carol. "Poem of the Week: The Darkling Thrush, by Thomas Hardy." The Guardian. Guardian News and Media, 28 Dec. 2009. Web. 5 April. 2014. .
Richard Wilbur's recent poem 'Mayflies' reminds us that the American Romantic tradition that Robert Frost most famously brought into the 20th century has made it safely into the 21st. Like many of Frost's short lyric poems, 'Mayflies' describes one person's encounter with an ordinary but easily overlooked piece of nature'in this case, a cloud of mayflies spotted in a 'sombre forest'(l.1) rising over 'unseen pools'(l.2),'made surprisingly attractive and meaningful by the speaker's special scrutiny of it. The ultimate attraction of Wilbur's mayflies would appear to be the meaning he finds in them. This seems to be an unremittingly positive poem, even as it glimpses the dark subjects of human isolation and mortality, perhaps especially as it glimpses these subjects. In this way the poem may recall that most persistent criticism of Wilbur's work, that it is too optimistic, too safe. The poet-critic Randall Jarrell, though an early admirer of Wilbur, once wrote that 'he obsessively sees, and shows, the bright underside of every dark thing'?something Frost was never accused of (Jarrell 332). Yet, when we examine the poem closely, and in particular the series of comparisons by which Wilbur elevates his mayflies into the realm of beauty and truth, the poem concedes something less ?bright? or felicitous about what it finally calls its 'joyful . . . task' of poetic perception and representation (l.23).
Shelley, Mary. Frankenstein: A Norton Critical Edition. ed. J. Paul Hunter. New York: W. W. Norton, 1996.
Shelley, Mary. “Frankenstein.” In A Norton Critical Edition. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, Inc. 1996.
At the moment of his birth, the creature is entirely innocent; he affectionately reaches out to Frankenstein, which is interpreted as a hostile movement, only to have the latter violently abandon him. Despite his appalling appearance, his “wrinkled” grin is as guiltless as a newly-born child which, in a sense, is precisely what he is to Frankenstein (61). With the rejection of his monster based solely on a personal appearance that epitomizes everything Frankenstein fears in his life, the reader begins to recognize the profoundly unethical character of Frankenstein's experiment and of Frankenstein himself.
Abrams, MH, et al. Eds. The Norton Anthology of English Literature. New York. W.W. Norton & Company, Inc., 1993.
Woolf, therefore, takes advantage of the lyrical short stories’ structure to create a liminal space that both breaks through barriers to form a unified, impressionistic world and to emphasize the imposing negative aspects of such a transitory structure. As a result, Woolf prompts the reader to question whether the liminal space created within the short story is positive in its ability to unite nature and human or negative in its apparent unsustainability. Regardless, the form and structure of the short story are pivotal in Kew Gardens. Without the liminal space of the short story, it is questionable if Woolf could have succeeded in creating the unstable, yet peaceful, world in Kew Gardens.