The conflict between humanity and the natural world is one that spans back into an ancient past, perhaps beginning with the myth of Prometheus - punished for granting the gift of fire to mankind. Due to this, it is unsurprising that both modernist...

The poetry of the Victorian novelist Thomas Hardy contains some progressive ideals which challenge negative stereotypes associated with women in the Victorian era; notable here are poems such as ‘A Sunday Morning Tragedy’ and ‘The Newcomer’s Wife’...

Victorian poet Thomas Hardy- having immensely enjoyed a childhood in the idyllic county of Dorset- was a stoic believer in the transformative power of nature which is explored through settings in both ‘Drummer Hodge’, and ‘Afterwards’ as nature is...

In the lyric poem Neutral Tones by Thomas Hardy, the speaker reflects back to a particular moment in their life when they realised that the love had died between them and the person they were in a relationship with. They consider what this moment...

Thomas Gray and Thomas Hardy both explore the treatment of loss in their poems ‘Sonnet on the Death of Mr. Richard West’, ‘Ode on the Death of a Favourite Cat, Drowned in a Tub of Goldfishes’, and ‘The Voice’. Each of these works provide a...

Thomas Hardy describes the unfortunate fate of ‘drummer hodge’, who was left to ‘rest’, ‘uncoffined - just as found’ on the battle field. Drummer hodge, who died fighting the Boer’s in South Africa, is used to reflect the alienation of lost...

In both the poetry of Hardy and Eliot, time is used as a key feature to portray feeling about the external world and speakers’ own positions within the universe. Whilst Hardy often uses time to signify the idea that time has the ability to heal...

Hardy explores the loss of identity in a society that pursues the horrors of war, in “Drummer Hodge”, which considers callousness of the Boer war in its denial of individual humanity and identity. Hardy uses a foreign landscape to contrast the...

Hardy’s ‘Beyond the Last Lamp’ presents the theme of love and time in a subtler way than Marvell’s poem, as we only realize the retrospective nature of the poem at the fourth stanza, and see that his memory of the couple’s difficulty has stayed...

A key theme occurring across Susan Hill’s The Woman in Black and Thomas Hardy’s Poems 1912-13 is the concept of the supernatural. Both Hill and Hardy describe apparitions of ghosts and communication with spirits in their work; however, the...

In Far from the Madding Crowd, Thomas Hardy uses nature to influence the actions of his shepherd and shepherdess protagonists, Bathsheba Everdene and Gabriel Oak, in two separate episodes involving rain storms. The conflict of Hardy’s Far from the...

In a novel titled Far from the Madding Crowd, Thomas Hardy could hardly proceed without copious description of the natural and pastoral setting of his work. The simple plot details demand notes on rusticity and Hardy’s Victorian sensibilities...