The Darkling Thrush, The Voice, The Going and The Convergance of the Twain revision notes

AS and A Level English

The Darkling Thrush

Stanza 1

How does Hardy establish a sense of time, place and mood in this stanza?

The frost reminds Hardy of ghosts, since it is described as ‘spectre-gray’. A word like ‘dregs’ suggests ‘residue’ or ‘remains’. The light is not fading, but ‘weakening’ as if engaged in a conflict which it is losing. We gain a sense of struggle. The bine-stems, instead of providing a lattice decoration for the sky, are said to ‘score’ it as if it is cutting the sky. The harmony of music is reduced to the ‘strings of broken lyres’. Hardy alone can see this scene, since everyone else was sensibly sitting round their household fire. This could have been an enchanting scene. Hardy could have gloried in the solitude; taken pleasure in the myriad shapes displayed by the frost, welcomed the soothing approach of night, and delighted in the patterns of the bine-stems. Instead he does the precise opposite, and intensifies the sense of gloom with the long vowel sounds at the end of every line. As an example of establishing a mood by the selection of evocative images, this first verse is superb.

Consider the time of year (and of the century), the time of day, and the place where the poet finds himself.

End of the century, considering the change in society. The pome’s altrenate title was “by century’s deathbed”

Why does Hardy tell the reader that other people who might have been present: “Had sought their household fires?” –

no one else sees the gloom of the scene which hardy does, and so they have returned to their homes

What is suggested to the reader by Hardy's use of the phrase “spectre-grey” and the verb “haunted?”

The theme of the supernatural which is prominent throughout hardy’s poetry.

Stanza 2

What does the bleak winter landscape suggest to Hardy? How is this image developed in the next two lines?

The link between death and nature surfaces. the morbidity of nature reminds him of his late wife and it is nostalgia that haunts him

What does “The ancient pulse of germ and birth” mean? Why is it “Shrunken hard and dry”? How does it mirror Hardy's own mood?

In hardy’s eyes, the world has entered decline, and “the ancient pulse of germ and birth” represents development. But it is now “shrunken and dry” and progress has halted. He is mourning the death of creative vitality

Why does Hardy imagine that “every spirit upon earth” shares his sense of spiritual desolation?

The strength of his dismay is infecting all of those around him

What is significant in Hardy's choice of the verb “seemed”, to qualify his lack of fervour?

Seemed undermines the use of the word fervour and therefore himself

Stanza 3

What is the effect of the words “voice” and “chosen”, when applied to the “aged thrush”?

The thrush is aged and and death aproaches it like the end of the century, and so the last of man’s creativity will perish with it.

Why is the bird's singing called “... a full-hearted evensong of joy illimited”?

It is ironic, as the joy that he felt with his wife, the thrush’s song and the century itself are all limited.

Why does Hardy inform the reader that the thrush is “aged...frail, gaunt” and “blast-beruffled”? What light does this throw on its joyful singing?
Why does Hardy imagine the thrush as flinging his soul “upon the growing gloom”?

Stanza 4

Why is the bird's song described as “carolings of ... ecstatic sound”?
It maintains the despondent aura whilst at the same time making the joy of the thrush even more miraculous. Note too how Hardy begins to invest this miracle with religious overtones. The thrush’s song is compared to evensong, a religious ceremony. The bird flings its soul upon the growing gloom. Since the soul was commonly seen as the immortal part of man, it is almost as if Hardy is seeing something eternal triumphing over the corpse of the century. This quasi-religious tone is reinforced with ...

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Stanza 4

Why is the bird's song described as “carolings of ... ecstatic sound”?
It maintains the despondent aura whilst at the same time making the joy of the thrush even more miraculous. Note too how Hardy begins to invest this miracle with religious overtones. The thrush’s song is compared to evensong, a religious ceremony. The bird flings its soul upon the growing gloom. Since the soul was commonly seen as the immortal part of man, it is almost as if Hardy is seeing something eternal triumphing over the corpse of the century. This quasi-religious tone is reinforced with the word ‘caroling’ in the first line of the final stanza
What does Hardy mean by saying that “little cause” for the joyful singing was “written on terrestrial things” ? If the cause is not found in terrestrial things, where, by implication, might it be found?

In god or in the supernatural. So he still finds “joyful singing” in the thoughts of his dead wife

How does Hardy suggest his own spiritual state by images of darkness, desolation and decay in the poem?
Do you find any significance in the fact that the poem was written on the last day of the last year of the century?
What do the thrush and the poet have in common? How are they different in their attitude to adversity?
Do you like or dislike this poem? Give reasons for your answer.

The Voice

The poem begins with a lyrical, effervescent flowing rhythm, “Woman much missed, how you call to me, call to me/saying that now you are not as you were”, as the enjambment and personal pronouns reflect the flowing, passionate romanticism that Hardy is trying to convey. However the structure of the poem is a diminuendo- as the happiness and love of the relationship is lost to “ wan wistlessness” and the “wet mead”, to the point that Hardy regresses into the elegiac reference to the “wanderer” with “Thus I”, and the final bitter calling of the woman reveals how their relationship regressed from one flowing love and “air blue gowns” to “listlessness” and the stumbling rhythm of the “leaves around me falling”
It’s about his refusal to accept the death of his wife. He is so caught up in his desire or her still that he almost thinks he can hear her voice talking to him.
Hardy’s last stanza is much shorter in its composition to the previous three stanzas and is his attempt to regain order in his life by moving on “faltering forward”. The difficulty Hardy feels in doing so is mirrored in the arrangement of punctuation- by placing a semi colon immediately after “Thus I” the phrase “faltering forward” is stressed. This combined with its use of alliteration alerts the reader to how significant the phrase is. It is Hardy’s attempt to accept the inevitability of death and move on with life.
This poem is in the form of a 1st person narrative as Hardy contemplates whether he can hear his dead wife’s voice or not. The poem has 4 stanzas; first 3 are in the form of anapestic metre. This conveys his initial hope, as he believes he can hear Emma’s voice. The anapaestic metre means that the lines are elongated, and this symbolises how Hardy is clinging on to the memory of his wife. However Hardy soon comes to term with her death. The most poignant line of the poem is “even in the original air blue gown” i.e. hardy has powerful delusions of Emma when she was youthful and full of radiance and beauty. This could also be seen as hardy seeing a phantom or spectre who he believes to be his wife.
The last line “and the woman calling” relates how hardy still reminisces Emma when he first met her and how these memories are still following him despite the shift in time. The memory of her is haunting him and he is totally falling apart.
The last stanza however is less fluent and almost chaotic in terms of the use of pathetic fallacy, “leaves faltering forward”. This reflects on Hardy’s mood and decision that he must move forward and Emma’s voice is imaginary. This conveys the sense of misery that he is feeling. This contrasts to the beginning of the poem which is optimistic. Hardy wrote this poem due to the guilt of not taking care of Emma when she was sick. They both had an estranged relationship. He is obviously somewhat lost without her and his grieving has left him with memories that appear to play tricks on his mind. They loved each other but it was a destructive love; perhaps the most powerful kind. Maybe the wind was to blow that pain away or was it a part of the force of destructive that was their relationship.
The last stanza is chaotic. The wind has blown it all apart. The repetitive vowel sounds, however, create some unity as the link each word together. The words merge. They become the wind; they become the echoing voice.
Hardy and Emma were separated at the time of her sudden unexpected death. He wrote several poems which reflect the stages of grief he is experiencing and this is largely believed to be the poem he wrote at the point of recovery.
Critics have suggested that the voice could be calling him to death and hardy is contemplating suicide, before recovering.
In the last stanza he realizes that he can’t go on seeing his wife in places she doesn’t exist. She is dead and although he will always think of her he can’t change the terms on which they parted and he feels alone and depressed.

Convergance of the twain

The Going

The Going, like most of the pieces in this section, is written in the first person - here Hardy evidently speaks for himself. The poem is in the form of a monologue addressed to Emma, containing many questions. She alone can give the answers.

Detailed commentary

Hardy asks Emma why she did not alert him to her imminent death, but left him “as if indifferent quite” to his feelings, without bidding him farewell: neither softly speaking words of parting, nor even asking him to speak a last word to her. He notes how, as the day dawned, he was unaware of what was happening to his wife, and of how this “altered all”.

Hardy asks Emma why she compels him to go outside, making him think, momentarily, that he sees her figure in the dusk, in the place where she used to stand, but ultimately distressing him as, in the gathering gloom, he sees only “yawning blankness” and not the familiar figure of Emma.

Turning back to the days when Emma's youth and beauty captivated him, Hardy wonders why, in later years, the joys of their courtship were neither remembered nor revived. He imagines how they might have rekindled their love by revisiting the places where they met while courting.

Finally Hardy concedes that what has happened cannot be changed and that he is as good as dead, waiting for the end ( “to sink down soon” ) and, in conclusion, informs Emma that she could not know how so sudden and unexpected a passing as hers could distress him as much as it has.

The metre of the poem is surprisingly lively, though the rhythm breaks down in the disjointed syntax and brief sentences of the final stanza. The brief rhyming couplet in the penultimate two lines of each stanza exaggerate this jauntiness, which seems rather inappropriate to the subject of the piece.

Though the reader sympathises with Hardy's evident grief, it is difficult not to be a little impatient with his tendency to wallow in self-pity. He reproaches Emma for leaving him, and thinks despairingly of his and her failure to rekindle, in later years, their youthful affection. Yet we feel that this is a tragedy largely of his own making. He has, after all, had some forty years in which to “seek/That time's renewal”. The fact that he expresses regret at his failure to do so only when the possibility has been removed by Emma's death casts doubt upon the sincerity of his grief.

The Haunter

Imaginatively, and most pathetically, Hardy writes this plaintive and moving poem from the point of view of Emma. It is written in the first person, with her as the imaginary narrator. It is almost as if, in putting these words in the mouth of Emma (who, in the poem, sees Hardy as oblivious of her presence) Hardy is trying to reassure himself that she forgives him and continues to love him.

Detailed commentary

Though Hardy does not know it, Emma's phantom follows him in his meanderings, hearing, but unable to respond to, the remarks he addresses to her in his grief. When Emma was able to answer Hardy did not address her so frankly; when she expressed a wish to accompany him Hardy would become reluctant to go anywhere - but now he does wish she were with him. She is, but he does not know this, even though he speaks as if to Emma's “faithful phantom”.

Hardy's deep love of nature appears in his choice of the places where he walks, the haunts of those given to reverie (daydreaming or contemplation): where the hares leave their footprints, or the nocturnal haunts of rooks. He also visits “old aisles” - are these literally the aisles of churches or natural pathways in woods and copses? In all these places Emma's ghost keeps as close as “his shade can do”. “Shade” is ambiguous: it is used here to mean “shadow” (Emma is as close as his own shadow to Hardy) but the term more usually means “ghost” - which is evidently very appropriate here. Again, Emma notes that she cannot speak to Hardy, however hard she may strive to do so.

Emma implores the reader to inform Hardy of what she is doing, with the almost desperate imperative: “O tell him!” She attends to his merest sigh, doing “all that love can do” in the hope that “his path” may be worth the attention she lavishes on it, and in the hope that she may bring peace to Hardy's life. The lyrical trochaic metre and subtly linked rhyme scheme seem in keeping with the optimistic content of the poem, unlikeThe Going, in which the liveliness jars with the sombre, self-pitying character of the piece. In The Going Hardy reproaches Emma, for leaving him without warning. Here he celebrates her essential fidelity and benevolence, which she retains, even in death. While the idea of Emma as the faithful phantom is, of course, entirely fanciful, it is strikingly plaintive and touching.