Zusammenfassung der Ressource
Hardy's Key Themes
- DISAPPOINTMENT
- Neutral Tones
- looking back at a woman he
has fallen out of love with
- it's a broken love affair
- 'Over tedious riddles
solved years ago
- love another
recurring theme
- but disappointment that H
is getting from falling in love
- I look into my glass
- writer recalling his age
and time that is passing
- idea of ageing
- therefore
disappointing
- rather depressing poem
- 'And view my
wasting skin'
- The Going
- H constantly asks
Emma why she
didn't warn him
about her death
- 'Why did you
give no hint
that night'
- and why she left
him as if she was
'indifferent quite'
to his feelings
w/o saying bye
- Hardy v upset about her death
- 'It altered all'
- E was giving H feelings of
wanting to go and leave his
house, in hope he would
see her, but he did and it
was a major cause for
disappointment
- 'The yawning blankness
of perspective sickens
me!'
- SUFFERING
- Neutral Tones
- I look into my glass
- The Voice
- H imagines he can hear her, &
asks her to appear for him
- causes S because all just imagination
and will never happen bc she is dead
- “You being ever consigned to existlessness,
heard no more again far or near?”
- E no live anymore, and
bound to non-existence
- H = sad & upset, adds to
his suffering over her death
- “Leaves around me falling,
wind oozing thin through the
thorn from norward.”
- depressing scenery reflects
his feelings of sadness
- from this point on, reader can
see H needed E in his life and he
was 'faltering forward' w/o her
- WAR
- Drummer Hodge
- main feature is meter used
- tetrameter, followed by trimeter
- creates a gentle drum beat
- to commemorate what
Hodge did in the war
- In Time of the Breaking of Nations
- H presents reader with 3 different
glimpses of everyday life
- suggests they will not change
- even when countries rise
& fall through war
- and even after wars have been fought
- “Yet this will go onward the
same through Dynasties pass.”
- Those glimpses of everyday
life will never fade away
- “War’s annals will cloud into
night ere their story die.”
- That means that war history will
be completely forgotten before
those basic activities are forgotten.
- in these poems, H presents the people
as having little control over their fate
- LOVE
- The Voice
- H tries to remember E
when she was in her
youth & how beaut
she was till the day
she died
- “Saying that now you are not as
you were when you had
changed from the one who was
all to me, but as at first, when
our day was fair.
- The Going
- H remembers places he
and E had visited
together while dating.
wished that they could
have gone there again
to rekindle their love
- “Did we not think of those days long dead,
and ere your vanishing strive to seek that
time’s renewal? We might have said, ‘In this
bright spring weather we’ll visit together
those places that once we visited.’”
- On The Departure Platform
- recalls of a woman of the past yet again, and
the separation between the writer and his lover
- The Pine Planters
- from 'The Woodlanders'
- Marty's love for Giles
- She loves him, he doesn't love her,
both work together in woods everyday
- definitely a similarity between his
love themed poems, and Hardy is
not one to share his emotions
- FATE
- Drummer Hodge
- in these
poems, H
presents the
people as
having little
control over
their fate
- The Convergence of the Twain
- idea that iceburg & Titanic
built for each other so one
day they could converge
- 'In the shadowy silent
distance grew the Iceburg too'
- H thinks fate
governs us and is
waiting for us - one
of reasons it is a
recurring theme
throughout
- During Wind and Rain
- H contrasts
happiness of dead
wife's childhood w/
inescapable grip
time has on life
- 'Elders and juniors' work in
garden to make 'the
pathways neat and the
garden gay'
- then fate and time catch up to
them and release their wrath and
the 'white storm-birds wing across'
- quote shows that a storm made by fate is
coming and coming to upset the happy occasion
- 'they are blithely breakfasting all' and
everybody is having good time 'under
summer tree' until fate suddenly
comes through w/ a storm and 'the
rotten rose is ripe from the wall'
- writer also speaks about them all
dying and fate catching up to them
- “they change
to a high new
horse.”
- But even at death, fate and time are still
cruel and it still affects them and makes it
presence known as “down their carved
names the rain-drop ploughs.”
- NATURE
- The Darkling Thrush
- recalls death of an old century/beginning of a new one
- thrush meant to represent new century
- but ironic as thrush is of an old generation surviving through this change
- 'An aged thrush, thin,
frail, gaunt, and small'