Pessimism in The Darkling Thrush by Thomas Hardy Thomas Hardy's writings are often steeped in pessimism, and his poem "The Darkling Thrush" is no exception. Through the desolation of the landscape, the narrator's reflections on the end of the century, and his reaction to the songbird, "The Darkling Thrush" reveals Hardy's concern with time, change, and remorse. Written in four octaves, “A Darkling Thrush” opens with views of a desolate winter landscape. With the “spectrum gray” frost covering everything in sight (line 2), all joyful colors and sounds are drowned out by an intangible film of desolation. This sadness must not be squandered, as the image of the “dregs of winter” suggests that there is a residue of the year's melancholy (3). The weight of the word “scum” creates a caesura, and the heaviness of the poem is reinforced with alternating lines of iambic tetrameters and iambic trimeters. The tangled sylvan stalks that mark the sky (5) and “the sharp features of the earth” (9) shift the miasmatic pessimism into a more sharply defined pain that intensifies with alliteration in “its crypt the cloudy canopy” ( 11). The “bleak twigs above” (18) project a clear image of bars stretching across the sky, embracing the darkness in Hardy's world. Reflecting the narrator's sense of perceptions, the bleak landscape mirrors the narrator's depression and projects his emotions into solid images. An occasional poem, "A Darkling Thrush", describes the setting of one century and the birth of another through the eyes of the narrator. Leaning perhaps wearily against the gate of the coppice, the narrator observes how even the people who infest the land like soulless wayfarers (7) return to their homes where their fires shine, a... middle of paper... .the last reason for hope. The thrush's exuberance enters the narrator's life for a brief moment, revealing a life lived to the fullest, but the narrator remains unconvinced and melancholy. By immersing “The Darkling Thrush” in a bleak landscape devoid of life and color, Thomas Hardy is able to weave pessimism into his work, providing a core of dark emotions to his narrator, who sees no hope for the empty society in which he lives . Even when he glimpses joy from an old thrush, the narrator declares his personal situation excluded from the possible causes of joy. Although all signs of hope are criticized as absurd, Thomas Hardy's "The Darkling Thrush" conveys a purely pessimistic view. Work Cited Hardy, Thomas, "The Darkling Thrush." 1900. The Norton Anthology of English Literature. 7th ed. 2 vols. New York: Norton, 2000. 2: 1935-1936.