Question

Give a critical appreciation of poem 'the the darkling thrush' by Thomas Hardy . Do you like or dislike the poem ? Give reasons

Answer 1

For The Darkling Thrush, Thomas Hardy chose a word with tremendous history in poetry. ‘Darkling’ means in darkness, or becoming dark, for Hardy can still see the landscape, and the sun is ‘weakening’ but not completely set. The word itself goes back to the mid fifteenth century. Milton, in Paradise Lost Book III describes the nightingale: ‘the wakeful Bird / Sings darkling, and in shadiest Covert hid / Tunes her nocturnal Note …’ Keats famously uses the word in his ‘Ode to a Nightingale’: ‘Darkling, I listen …’. Matthew Arnold, in ‘Dover Beach’
writes about the ‘darkling plain’.

In other words, this title gives the poem a resonance of past poets and their thoughts and feelings on a similar subject; it makes specific allusions to these poets and poems; their echoes become a part of its tradition.