Remembering the Dead
Both “Afterwards” and “The Voice” focus on the disjunction between who a person is when they are alive, and how they are remembered after their death. In “Afterwards,” the speaker speculates about the aftermath of his own death. His assumption that he will be remembered as a man who noticed things is tempered by the poem’s repeated use of questions, which emphasizes that ultimately knowledge about how we will be remembered is utterly inaccessible to us. Conversely, “The Voice” is written from the perspective of a man whose wife has just died. Here, we see that he does indeed remember her, not as she was when she died, but as she was when she was young, and he was still in love with her. In this case, even as he imagines that he hears her voice, she exists, in memory, entirely on the terms of her husband and his desires.
Nature and Romanticism
“Afterwards,” “The Voice,” and “The Darkling Thrush” are all set in the countryside. In each poem, Hardy lingers over imagery of the natural world, often employing metaphor, simile, and alliteration in order to provide emphasis and suggest the connections between various details of the natural world, and between the natural world and human beings. Despite this clear reverence for the natural world, Hardy also has a tendency to depict it as bleak and barren. In contrast to the work of Romantic poets like Percy Shelley, who argued for the natural world as the sublime alternative to the fleeting meaninglessness of human accomplishment and civilization, Hardy depicts the natural world as implicated in the failures of humanity. Both “The Darkling Thrush” and “The Voice” draw parallels between a death—either of a century or a loved one—and the cold hopelessness of winter. Thus, rather than a source of renewal, the natural world becomes an echo of the author’s own pessimism.
Loss of the Past
“The Darkling Thrush” presents the end of the nineteenth century as a kind of death, with the beginning of the twentieth century as its reluctant funeral. Rather than writing about history in terms of progress, Hardy orients his poetry towards the past. His pervasive nostalgia depicts a sense that the past was better than the present, and the poem is thus driven by a sense both of mourning, and of unfulfilled desire. This same sensibility appears in more personal form in “The Voice,” which similarly seems oriented towards an intangible past that cannot be regained by the author. In the case of “The Darkling Thrush,” Hardy evokes not just personal mourning, but a deeply pessimistic view of human and literary history. The poem depicts the present as a land made barren, arguing that the passage of time can no longer bring about regeneration. Hardy even implicates poetry in this history, suggesting that the literary tradition in which he himself writes has also reached its end.
The Role of Poetry
“Afterwards,” “The Voice,” and “The Darkling Thrush” all use many poetic devices to talk about a diverse set of themes, and to depict a variety of images. At the same time, they also turn back in on themselves in order to discuss poetry itself. “Afterwards” glorifies the act of noticing, pointing both to the mechanisms of poetry and to the building blocks of the novel, Hardy’s other major literary pursuit. In this more optimistic poem, poetry becomes a way to be remembered, and a way to engage meaningfully with the world in order to form connections between oneself and the vast universe. In contrast, “The Darkling Thrush” presents a more pessimistic view, suggesting that the beginning of the modern era has broken a poetic tradition drawing back all the way to an ancient past. Yet, at the same time, the voice of the thrush seems to symbolize a new poetry which might bring a frail but present hope. “The Voice” similarly draws a connection between the voice of the speaker’s dead lover which the poem depicts, and the voice of the poem itself. There, the instability of the first-personal voice, and the inconsistency of the speaker’s tone and diction, suggests a desire for a more conversational mode of poetry which the woman’s death has made impossible.
Finding Meaning Without God
Hardy’s particular atheism was rooted in what he saw as the many cruelties of human life, and in the belief that no just God could allow the suffering which exists on earth. It was hence a deeply pessimistic atheism, and throughout his life, Hardy struggled to find meaning in the world as he perceived it. “The Darkling Thrush” presents a nuanced approach to this question. On the one hand, it depicts a world which is deteriorating, a history which gradually worsens along with the land. Without the universal resurrection promised by Christianity, the nineteenth century remains a corpse, the land remains barren, and there is little hope for a more meaningful future. Yet, at the same time, Hardy draws a distinction between “terrestrial things” and a hope which might come from beyond the earth. It isn’t clear that this hope can have a material impact on the bleakness of the speaker’s world, but it does suggest that that bleakness is not all that exists.
