Aim for FiveEnglish Literature

Poetry analysis

Hardy's "The Darkling Thrush": hope at the century's end

  • Unit 2
  • 6 points
  • About 40 minutes

You read one poem and write an essay analyzing how the poet uses literary elements and techniques to develop a complex idea the prompt names. You need a defensible thesis, specific evidence from the poem, and commentary explaining how it supports your reading. On the exam: Free-response question 1 of 3 in Section II (3 essays in 2 hours, 55% of the exam score); about 40 minutes suggested; 6 points: thesis 1, evidence and commentary 4, sophistication 1.

The question and its sources

Suggested time: 40 minutes, including reading and planning. Read the poem, plan, then write your essay in the box. The poem's lines are numbered so you can point to them, for example (lines 3–4). Words you may not know: coppice (a small wood), bine-stems (the stems of climbing plants), outleant (stretched out), germ (seed), evensong (an evening song or service), illimited (without limit).

The Darkling Thrush

I leant upon a coppice gate
When Frost was spectre-gray,
And Winter’s dregs made desolate
The weakening eye of day.
Line 5
The tangled bine-stems scored the sky
Like strings from broken lyres,
And all mankind that haunted nigh
Had sought their household fires.
The land’s sharp features seemed to be
Line 10
The Century’s corpse outleant,
His crypt the cloudy canopy,
The wind his death-lament.
The ancient pulse of germ and birth
Was shrunken hard and dry,
Line 15
And every spirit upon earth
Seemed fervourless as I.
At once a voice outburst among
The bleak twigs overhead
In a full-hearted evensong
Line 20
Of joy illimited;
An aged thrush, frail, gaunt, and small,
In blast-beruffled plume,
Had chosen thus to fling his soul
Upon the growing gloom.
Line 25
So little cause for carollings
Of such ecstatic sound
Was written on terrestrial things
Afar or nigh around,
That I could think there trembled through
Line 30
His happy good-night air
Some blessed Hope, whereof he knew
And I was unaware.

Source: Thomas Hardy, "The Darkling Thrush," dated December 1900, from Poems of the Past and the Present (1901). Public domain.

Suggested time: 40 minutes

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The essay

6 points

In the following poem by Thomas Hardy, dated the last month of the nineteenth century, a speaker leaning on a gate in a winter landscape hears a thrush begin to sing. Read the poem carefully. Then write a well-organized essay that analyzes how Hardy uses literary elements and techniques to convey the speaker's complex response to the thrush's song. In your essay: • State a thesis that answers the prompt with a defensible interpretation. • Choose evidence from the poem that supports your line of reasoning. • Explain how that evidence supports your line of reasoning. • Use grammar and punctuation that make your argument clear.

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