Like Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Raven,” “The Darkling Thrush” is set on a dim winter evening. The poem’s first-person speaker, “I,” is in a meditative frame of mind; he leans on a gate—a classic pose for a Romantic thinker. This is a “coppice” (Line 1) gate, an adjectival form of “copse,” meaning a small, wooded area. The gate can be understood as a boundary line between human civilization and the chaotic wilderness beyond. The speaker is alone in this desolate scene, as everyone else has fled to the warm comforts of their fireplaces (Line 8). In Hardy’s death-obsessed poetic universe, even living people “haunt” (Line 7) their homes.

The first stanza is chock full of sensory words emphasizing the bitter hopelessness of the scene and the speaker’s fixation on cold and death (e.g., “spectre-grey” [Line 2], “broken” [Line 6], and “haunted” [Line 7]). Personifications of Frost and Winter in Lines 2 and 3 emphasize the harsh nature of the landscape. The sun is already setting, but these wintry forces make the fading of the sunlight feel even more “desolate” (Line 3). Hardy also personifies the sun by comparing it to a “weakening eye” (Line 4). He invites the reader to imagine the eye closing, a visual shorthand for the moment a person dies.