Thomas Hardy: Poems Thomas Hardy

John Keats’s “Ode to a Nightingale” and Thomas Hardy’s “The Darkling Thrush,” though written nearly a century apart, share many poetic elements that allow readers to effectively draw a surface parallel between the two poems. Though both of these...

Psalm 142, verse 2: “No man cared...” This Biblical verse applies perfectly to “In Tenbris”, a poem written out of despair for the society Hardy in which lived. He expresses his pity and contempt for the materialist citizens and power hungry...

Thomas Hardy wrote “The Shadow on the Stone” after his wife’s death, and the ghost he mentions is his wife’s. The poem focuses on the realities of time and death. The poet’s feelings are complex, which is reflected in the complex rhyme scheme of...

The question of fate is one that has been posed by human beings throughout the ages. Are our lives determined by that which is “bound” to happen, or is it simply by random chance? Thomas Hardy addresses this question in his poem “Hap,” which...

'In my memory / Again and again I see it strangely dark / And vacant of a life but just withdrawn.’

Edward Thomas’s The Chalk Pit suggests a number of ways of considering the correlation between memory and writing. The line is at once visually...

"At an Inn" is a poem written by Thomas Hardy, a composition showcasing Hardy’s longing for another woman who is not his wife, Florence. In this work, Hardy focuses on the misinterpretations of the nature of the two’s relationship from strangers...

The breakdown of a relationship is presented in many ways throughout both ‘Neutral Tones’ by Thomas Hardy and ‘Modern Love’ by George Meredith. For example, they both explore themes of memory, and loss (of love). I will be exploring and comparing...

The poems under study are Neutral Tones ("NT") and I Look Into My Glass ("Glass"). Both poems focus on loss of a different kind: "Glass" expresses the loss of Hardy's youth; "NT" focuses on the death of Hardy's estranged wife, it grieves the loss...

Thomas Gray and Thomas Hardy both explore the treatment of loss in their poems ‘Sonnet on the Death of Mr. Richard West’, ‘Ode on the Death of a Favourite Cat, Drowned in a Tub of Goldfishes’, and ‘The Voice’. Each of these works provide a...

The conflict between humanity and the natural world is one that spans back into an ancient past, perhaps beginning with the myth of Prometheus - punished for granting the gift of fire to mankind. Due to this, it is unsurprising that both modernist...

The poetry of the Victorian novelist Thomas Hardy contains some progressive ideals which challenge negative stereotypes associated with women in the Victorian era; notable here are poems such as ‘A Sunday Morning Tragedy’ and ‘The Newcomer’s Wife’...

Victorian poet Thomas Hardy- having immensely enjoyed a childhood in the idyllic county of Dorset- was a stoic believer in the transformative power of nature which is explored through settings in both ‘Drummer Hodge’, and ‘Afterwards’ as nature is...

In the lyric poem Neutral Tones by Thomas Hardy, the speaker reflects back to a particular moment in their life when they realised that the love had died between them and the person they were in a relationship with. They consider what this moment...

Thomas Gray and Thomas Hardy both explore the treatment of loss in their poems ‘Sonnet on the Death of Mr. Richard West’, ‘Ode on the Death of a Favourite Cat, Drowned in a Tub of Goldfishes’, and ‘The Voice’. Each of these works provide a...

Thomas Hardy describes the unfortunate fate of ‘drummer hodge’, who was left to ‘rest’, ‘uncoffined - just as found’ on the battle field. Drummer hodge, who died fighting the Boer’s in South Africa, is used to reflect the alienation of lost...

In both the poetry of Hardy and Eliot, time is used as a key feature to portray feeling about the external world and speakers’ own positions within the universe. Whilst Hardy often uses time to signify the idea that time has the ability to heal...

Hardy explores the loss of identity in a society that pursues the horrors of war, in “Drummer Hodge”, which considers callousness of the Boer war in its denial of individual humanity and identity. Hardy uses a foreign landscape to contrast the...

Hardy’s ‘Beyond the Last Lamp’ presents the theme of love and time in a subtler way than Marvell’s poem, as we only realize the retrospective nature of the poem at the fourth stanza, and see that his memory of the couple’s difficulty has stayed...

A key theme occurring across Susan Hill’s The Woman in Black and Thomas Hardy’s Poems 1912-13 is the concept of the supernatural. Both Hill and Hardy describe apparitions of ghosts and communication with spirits in their work; however, the...

In the poetry of Thomas Hardy, one can note that the poet conveys a deep sense of sadness. Throughout his poetry, the Going, for instance, Hardy makes use of authorial methods in order to heighten the tragedy, and thus, allow his poems to convey a...

‘A Wife in London’ is an anti-war whereby war is portrayed in an unflattering light. Hardy narrates the death of a soldier who fought in the African Boer War and conveys the devastating consequences this has on the soldier’s family. As such, Hardy...