The Analysis of Imagery and Fi

A detailed Summary of The Analysis of Imagery and Fi

Analyzing elements of poetic style is generally accepted as one method of exploring a poet?s ideas and beliefs. How someone perceives the world is revealed in the way they speak. A poet?s attitudes toward what poetry can and should be attempting to communicate are exhibited in style. In other words, the voice, use of images and figurative language determines how a poem is read and reveals what is being said. I have selected Hardy?s ?The Darkling Thrush? as a representative poem for this discussion.

?The Darkling Thrush? is a poem occasioned by the beginning of a new year and a new century. A movement of subject is apparent in the first two stanzas from an observation of a winter landscape as perceived by an individual speaker to a terrible vision of the death of an era that the landscape seems to disclose. The action of the poem lies in the apprehension of this particular moment of seeing changes as the emotional impact as the scene solidifies.

The diction here is simple and direct, and the tone is the quiet voice of private conversation. The spectral quality of ?Frost? is accurate in suggesting a s

The second sentence emphasizes earthly shrinkage and aridness. The ending of the century is not a simple closing to the speaker, but an end, which seems to sever it from any relation to the future. Every spirit and human life is under the reign of this death.

The two lines above also have a romantic link. Here, Hardy has taken the romantic and soothing instrument of the lyre and described it as broken. It is important to note that the images here also give concrete detail. The stems of a climbing vine, such as woodbine or hops, that could be found on a gate or neighboring trees, are part of the actual country scene. Vines, stripped and tangled in wintertime, do look like a mess of sprung strings. The vines subtly elaborate on the idea of dregs, both as the residuals of summer fertility and harvest, and the idea of lees, the base remainder of wine. The verb ?scored? has several meanings: the idea of tallying up or recording costs or grudges or numbers in a competition as in time?s losses and gains reduced to dead stems; the act of notching the sky which is visually accurate if one is looking up through vines; and the idea of a written orchestration or musical score which lead the observer to think of music and stringed instruments that are broken.

Here, a natural setting of a significant time, the end of day at the end of the year, is recollected and retold by a solitary observer standing at a physical boundary, the edge of the woods. The scene has only the barest traces of life, in which natural and human presences are ghost-like. What started as a simple description of a winter scene by a physically passive observer subtly develops into a kind of mindscape that implies a sort of vigil. Although the situation of the poem is given to the reader in the past tense as a memory, we experience the poem as something the speaker is experiencing in the present.

Some common words found in the essay are:
Darkling Thrush, , weakening eye, growing gloom, darkling thrush, hard dry, speakers emotions, centurys corpse, poem speaker, real world, vision death, winters dregs,

Approximate Word count = 1579
Approximate Pages = 6 (250 words per page double spaced)

Category: English