Stanzas one and two provide a setting of the poem in which the reader is placed in the position of the poet, and is made to feel what the person speaking feels on this eve of the new year. The poet is standing at a gate looking over a desolate scene. In this situation the gate may symbolise a barrier, the barrier possibly being a sense of despair of what the future may hold. The frost covering the scene is described as being ghost-like. This is depicted through the words 'spectre-grey'. The weight of the words 'winter dregs' furthers the effect of these words which in turn leads into the effect of reiterating the desolation that is being described by this individual character. The word 'dregs' forces the reader to pause in the line of verse, adding to this effect. The sun is depicted as the 'weakening eye of day', which is a personification. This

Hardy manages to put together an amazing piece of poetry, not only due to language and tone of the poem, but also the fact that he manages to become a poet, within a poet describing the scene before him. Although he is the writer of the piece, he places an unknown individual in the scene, describing the feelings the dawn of a new century brings. The poem concludes cleverly with a mingling of melancholy as well as hope, a contradiction within itself.

The scene of the first stanza depicts only the barest traces of life, what began as the description of a winter scene by a lone individual becomes like a night time period of staying awake to look after a sick person, however in this case a 'sick' land.

Some common words found in the essay are:
Thomas Hardy, religious theme, century's corpse, third stanza, stanza word, sense hope,
Approximate Word count = 825
Approximate Pages = 3 (250 words per page double spaced)