The Tone in the Tune: An Echo of Burns in Hardy's "The Darkling Thrush"

Abstract

[From article:] The most anthologized of Thomas Hardy's poems, "The Darkling Thrush," is also a site of contesting themes of skepticism, agnosticism, denial, and regret [...] Yet there is a chorus of agreement about the downcast tone of the poem. [...] This agreement about tone seems the more correct on recalling that Hardy had originally entitled the poem "By the Century's Deathbed," which he later dated "31st December 1900," a title and time consonant with the poem's funereal imagery, austere landscape, evening hour, and melancholic mood, features granting the poem an ancestry dating to the Graveyard School poetry of the mid-eighteenth century. But a different tone may become audible when recalling Hardy's love of music. [...]