Analyzing elements of poetic style is generally accepted as one method of exploring a poet's ideas and beliefs. How someone perceives the world is revealed in the way they speak. A poet's attitudes toward what poetry can and should be attempting to communicate are exhibited in style. In other words, the voice, use of images and figurative language determines how a poem is read and reveals what is being said. I have selected Hardy'sThe Darkling Thrush? as a representative poem for this discussion.
?The Darkling Thrush? is a poem occasioned by the beginning of a new year and a new century. A movement of subject is apparent in the first two stanzas from an observation of a winter landscape as perceived by an individual speaker to a terrible vision of the death of an era that the landscape seems to disclose. The action of the poem lies in the apprehension of this particular moment of seeing changes as the emotional impact as the scene solidifies.
I leant upon a coppice gate.
When Frost was specter-gray, .
And Winter's dregs made desolate.
The weakening eye of day.
The diction here is simple and direct, and the tone is the quiet voice of private conversation. The spectral quality ofFrost? is accurate in suggesting a snow-white coating, age, and the ghostly quality apparent in its Latin rootspectrum?, which means appearance or image. The landscape is anappearance? we are seeing through the eyes of the speaker. The phenomena of frost is wonderfully represented but it also coincides with the psychological state of the speaker which becomes evident as the poem develops. Whether he was leaning on the gate at the edge of a wooded grove in casual observation or from fatigue, a sense of oppressiveness is underscored in the imagery given to us by Hardy. The image ofWinter's dregs? picks up and compounds the effect ofspecter-gray? which, in turn, leads into an effect of exhalation indesolate.?.
