“The Darkling Thrush” by Thomas Hardy is written in an ABAB rhyme scheme, with alternating paragraphs of iambic tetrameter, and iambic trimeter. The alternating meters give a relaxing rhythm to the poem, which Hardy uses to paint a picture of a cold, winter’s day.
The first stanza starts with “I leant upon a coppice gate/ When Frost was spectre-gray,/ And Winter’s dregs made desolate/ The weakening eye of day”. The speaker is leaning up against a gate that opens into the woods. He personifies Frost as being ghostly gray, and describes the Winter snow as falling heavily to the ground as the day comes to an end. The stanza goes on to say “The tangled bine-stems scored the sky/ Like strings of broken lyres,/ And all mankind that haunted nigh/ Had sought their household fires.” The speaker continues describing the outside condition, and notices that the branches from shrubs are destroyed, like the strings of a broken lyre. In this simile, the speaker is saying that there is no happiness, or lively music in the world because everything is ruined. The speaker goes on to say that all of the other people who had been outside went home to sit by the fire. Throughout this stanza, the speaker alludes to ghosts, and death. First, he describes the Frost as being ghostly gray, and he goes on to describe the “mankind that had haunted nigh…”. He also uses alliteration to create a creepy, desolate scene in the reader’s mind. For example, the speaker says “And Winter’s dregs made desolate”