Thomas Hardy's "The Darkling Thrush"
The Daily Poem
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The Darkling of Thomas Hardy
This is one of hardy's most lyrical poems. Musical in execution, metaphor, theme and even title. The kesian word darkling simply means in the dark but it has the sound of a preludial shimmer of bird song visually too. It prepares us for the image of the aged thrush, al gaunt and small in blast, berufled plume. Another use of the ling suffox is to produce a diminutive of a noun, as an gostling, duckling, sapling, et cetera. And though this isn't what is happeningetymologically in darkling, we pick up a distant sense of it, and therefore of
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