Poets often write about ideas through exploring emotions. In light of this comment, examine ways in which poets develop their ideas through feelings and emotions. You should write about a least two poems including the darkling thrush or gods grandeur, or
Johan Stovin
6AN
Poets often write about ideas through exploring emotions. In light of this comment, examine ways in which poets develop their ideas through feelings and emotions. You should write about a least two poems including the darkling thrush or gods grandeur, or both.
To explore this comment, I am going to analyse two poems, ‘The Darkling Thrush’, by Thomas Hardy, and ‘God’s Grandeur’, by Gerard Manley Hopkins.
In ‘The Darkling Thrush’, Hardy gives a very negative image. He uses phrases such as ‘when frost was spectre-grey’, and ‘ The Century’s corpse outleant’, which give the reader the image of death. In this poem Hardy is talking about the death of the 19th century as it moves into the 20th Century. The poem itself was written on the 31st December 1899, the turn of the Century.
Hardy shows the narrator as having sad, grievous emotions throughout the poem. This is contrasted with the emotions of the thrush, which is portrayed to be celebrating, and happy. The narrator appears to have given up on life, which is shown through the comment ‘And every spirit on earth seemed fervourless as I’. On the other hand, the thrush which is shown as being towards the end of its life in the verse ‘an aged thrush, frail, gaunt and small’, seems to be holding on to all it can. The narrators comment shows his opinion on the time in the verse ‘so little cause for carolings’. The thrush however is in the process of giving a ‘full-hearted evensong’, which is giving the impression that there was everything to live for.