The Darkling Thrush
A speaker leaning on a coppice gate at nightfall sees the frost as spectre-grey, the tangled bine-stems scoring the sky like the strings of a broken lyre, and the whole landscape laid out as the corpse of the century. Out of the bleak twigs an aged thrush, frail and gaunt and small, flings its voice at the growing gloom for reasons the speaker can find nowhere in the visible world. Dated 31 December 1900 and printed at the turn of the century, it is the poem in which Hardy's habitual pessimism admits a hope it refuses to account for.
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- alludes to ↑ Ode to a Nightingale
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Archetype (Jung / Campbell)
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Closest analogues
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- 65% · 11 shared