Page 92 - 100 Best Loved Poems - Teaching Unit

“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?

The colors of the poem are all traditional symbols of death. Black suggests sorrow and
mourning. Red suggests blood and pain. White suggests the absence of color and feeling.

2. Which specific words connote both spiritual and physical cold and discomfort?

Answers may vary. Examples: “spectre-gray,” “crypt,” “dry,” “bleak,” “frail,” “gaunt,”
and “gloom.”

3. What essential paradox does the flight and the song of the thrush in the midst of a
moribund landscape present?

The paradox present is the contrast of life and death, of hope and desolation.

4. How does Hardy establish a sense of time, place, and mood in this poem?

Hardy uses specific words to establish the poem’s time, place, and mood. He relies on the
senses, employing touch (“leant”), sight (“weakening eye”), and hearing (“voice arose”).

5. The image of “The weakening eye of day,” is a metaphor for what?

The eye of day is a metaphor for the sun.

6. What surprises the speaker in the middle of this cold winter night?

In the second stanza, the speaker is surprised to hear a song of “joy illimited” from the
thrush in the middle of such a harsh, cold evening. This further surprises the speaker
because the thrush puts forth such a strong song, yet is such a “frail, gaunt, and small”
bird.

7. What does the speaker feel might be carried in the tune the thrush sings?

In the final stanza, the speaker says he thinks there may be “Some blessed Hope” within
the thrush’s song. If the thrush can sing of happiness in the cold, dead winter, he believes
perhaps he, too, could find some hope in such a dark time.

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