Thomas Hardy's "The Darkling Thrush" deals with the loneliness and sadness of the speaker in the midst of his desolate winter surroundings. It also illustrates the death of one century and the birth of another by means of the speaker's perspective. He uses images such as the "tangled bine-stems," the bleak landscape, and the "Century's corpse" to create a sense of how the desolation contributes to the speaker's melancholy state. He also uses the bleak and wintry landscape as a metaphor for the close of the nineteenth century and the joyful song of a solitary thrush as a symbol of the new century. The poem is constructed of four octaves, each containing alternating lines of iambic tetrameters and iambic trimeters.
The first and second octaves give a description of the landscape as well as the mood of the speaker. The first octave begins with an image of the speaker leaning upon an opening in a thicket, as a "specter-gray Frost" begins to settle. The "dregs" of winter that have left the landscape barren and lifeless reflects the loneliness and sadness that the speaker feels as he stands alone in the cold evening air. "The tangled bine-stems scored the sky/Like strings of broken lyres" represents beauty and harmony, which were once a part of the land. The speaker remarks on how even those who "haunted" nearby have returned to the comfort of "their household fires." Once again, the speaker is referring to the fact that he is alone. His use of the words specter-gray and haunted is a reference to the theme of death and desolation which contributes to his melancholy state.
The second octave gives more images of death and desolation. "The land's sharp features," the barren landscape that is devoid of life, is compared to the "Century's corpse" being laid out in the "crypt" that is formed by the "cloudy canopy," while the wind sings "his death lament." The earth, which normally produces life from seeds buried in its soil, has become "hard and dry," making it incapable of producing life.
