Commentaire : "The darkling Trush"

« Secondly, the w riter m ade specious choices of im agery through the beginning of his poem in order to create an apocalyptic atm osphere.

Thus, the reader pictures a frozen earth decaying w here life is increasingly rare just like in the “Snow piercer”.

For exam ple, in the first stanza, “Frost” is com pared w ith a “spectre-gray” w hich sets a gloom y atm osphere.

Besides, m aybe that using the w ord “Frost”, the w riter m akes allusion to G reek god w ho controls the w eather.

So this can m ean that this god is dead so that nobody controls the w eather anym ore.

Thus, it introduces the them e of death w ithin the poem .

Besides, this can also explain w hy it is so cold outside, w hy the sky seem s to be out of w hack as it is suggested on line 5 w ith “tangled bine-stem s scored the sky” w hich are probably related to som e strange lightning inordinately spurting out the sky.

Thirdly, the industrial revolution w hich began in England is a m ajor turning point of history as w ell as the turn of the tw entieth century.

In France it w as called the “scientism ”, m ost of the artists didn’t like this scientific and technological progress.

So H ardy can be com pared w ith French poets as Baudelaire, w ho, in poem s he w rote during this period, also refers to the m elancholy that those transform ations produced to him , especially the “H ausm an transform ation” in Paris.

A ctually, he thought that this novelty w ould poison the life of the low class people and drow n the spirit of nature as w ell as H ardy seem s to see the industrial revolution as anti-nature.

H is desolation for this is show n through the line 6 w ith “like strings of broken lyres” w hich instigates the dam ages caused by industrial im provem ent.

Fourthly, the w riter enhance the apocalyptic atm osphere in describing the landscape w ith m etaphors w ho m ake things appears w orse than they probably are.

For exam ple, he w rote “household fires” w hich m akes allusion to the chim ney fires w arm hearted that are usually the sym bol of the house’s heart, allow ing its inhabitants to live com fortably and convivially w hile there, it seem s to destroy the house or at least to be harm ful to the house and its inhabitants.​ ​Besides, the “W inter”, line 3, can also be related to the end of life, the death.

This m etaphor is highlighted by the alliteration of the sound “k” w hich m im es sounds of ice cracking or all other sorts of destruction w hich inspires again apocalypse.

Furtherm ore, the idea of earth breaking is present again in the second stanza, on line 9, w ith “land's sharp” w hich is accom panied by another allusion to death on line 10 : “Century's corpse outleant” w hich clearly proclaim s funerals of the dying century.

A dditionally, on line 12, the w eather is related to the century’s death, indeed the w riter says that the “w ind” seem ed to be “[the] death-lam ent” of the “land's sharp features”.

Thus, through all the lines quoted previously, the w riter em beds an harm onious hurricane of the death.

Fifthly, after this hurricane, the reader perceives an overtone of positivity through the third stanza w ith “a voice arose am ong” and “ecstatic song” w hich inspires a sunbeam far aw ay, the gleam. »