The Speaker (“The Darkling Thrush")
The speaker in "The Darkling Thrush" is disillusioned and pessimistic. He looks closely at his wintry landscape, and at the changing world, and determines that there is no cause for hope.
The Thrush (“The Darkling Thrush")
The thrush breaks the bleakness of the landscape with his song. Although his body is scruffy and thin from the difficulties of making it through winter, his voice is bright and joyful.
The Speaker ("Afterwards")
The speaker in "Afterwards" speculates on the time and manner of his death, and on how his neighbors will remember him. He speaks of his death in a measured tone. The reflections of his neighbors suggest that he is a caring and attentive man, if a somewhat ineffectual one.
The Speaker's Survivors ("Afterwards")
"Afterwards" deviates from Hardy's lyrical poetry by including dialogue from other characters besides the speaker. In the first, fourth, and fifth stanza, the survivors speak as a group, suggesting a generally held perception of him. In the second stanza, the speaker's capacity for observation is noted by "a gazer," another person accustomed to careful observation of the landscape. In the third stanza, a different "one" recalls, more cynically, how hard the speaker worked to protect other living creatures, and how little he could do for them.
The Speaker ("The Voice")
The speaker in "The Voice" is clearly haunted by the death of the woman he loved, even as he only misses her not as she was when she died, but as she was in the distant past. Despite the fact that the woman was no longer "all to [him]" when she died, he is still haunted by her loss. To some extent, the speaker is synonymous with Hardy himself, who had recently lost his own estranged wife, Emma Gifford.
The Woman ("The Voice")
Although the woman in "The Voice" died in her old age, the speaker remembers and misses her as she was when she was young. Then she was beautiful, and passionately attached to the speaker.
