Page 191 - 100 Best Loved Poems - Teaching Unit
P. 191
“The Darkling Thrush”
by Thomas Hardy, pages 72-73
Vocabulary
coppice – a thicket of tress or shrubs
dregs – remains
fervourless – void of emotion
illimited – unlimited
1. How do the dominant colors of the poem (black, white, and red) connote death and
ghostliness and further indicate the desolation of the speaker and the scene?
2. Which specific words connote both spiritual and physical cold and discomfort?
3. What essential paradox does the flight and the song of the thrush in the midst of a
moribund landscape present?
4. How does Hardy establish a sense of time, place, and mood in this poem?
5. The image of “The weakening eye of day,” is a metaphor for what?
6. What surprises the speaker in the middle of this cold winter night?
7. What does the speaker feel might be carried in the tune the thrush sings?
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