“The Oxen”, is written from a standpoint of innocence. As a reader, it’s easy to tell that Hardy is writing the poem from his memories as a child by grasping on to the naive tone expressed in the beginning lines. “An elder said as we sat in a flock”(3). His word choice in this line resembles the thought process of a small child, sitting quietly in a large group or “flock”, listening to what the teacher or parent, “elder”, had to say. The same tone shows up again in later lines, “Nor did it occur to one of us there/ To doubt they were kneeling then.”All the children, still too young to think of questioning anything a person so old and wise said. Even if, it was cattle kneeling before baby Jesus, it gave the children something to believe in. By the end of the poem, Hardy’s tone changes entirely. Slowly fading into skepticism and reality. “I should go with him in the gloom/ Hoping it might be so.”(15-16) Seemingly torn between two beliefs, Hardy still shows a small glimmer of hope that the legend of the kneeling oxen is true in line 16, but feels that realistically no such thing happens at midnight on Christmas Eve.
Darkling Thrush is actually a very gloomy and depressing poem to read. In the first stanza, Hardy gives us a description of where he pictures this poem. His description has an all over dreary tone, because of descriptors he uses like, “desolate”, “tangled”, and “broken lyres”. All of these words are unnerving and a little creepy. At the end of the stanza, he even says, “And all mankind that haunted nigh/ Had sought their household fires.”(7-8). Meaning that most would have chosen to stay inside on a day like that one. The sad tone continues in stanza two, but changes in stanza three when the turn of the century finally comes. The tone changes to hopefulness, Hardy talking about a voice rising over the seemingly dead earth. “In a full-hearted evensong/ Of joy illimited”((19-20). But he was confused, how could something sing with such joy when there was no joy to sing about? Giving the voice an image of heroism. Hardy assumes the voice has knowledge of happy times that he doesn’t know about yet. Giving him a reason to hope that joy was going to come. “Some blessed Hope, whereof he knew/ And I was unaware.”(31-32)
In conclusion, Thomas Hardy’s writings are hard to understand, and on the surface they seem entirely sad and depressing. But when you take a closer look, there is always hope or happiness sprinkled in somewhere.
