Compare or contrast Thomas Hardys `The Darkling Thrush` to either Percy Shelleys ` To a Sky-Lark` or John Keats `Ode to a Nightingale.` Do you consider Thomas Hardy the antithesis of the Romantic poet?

In Nightingale , however , shooting from his Romantic roots , Keats explores the fleeting Nature of escape that enlightenment provides . He wants to embody the immortal freedom and perpetual joy that he believes the nightingale possesses , if only for a moment through poetry - but ultimately he must face his own mortality and interminable insularity from the rest of eternity . In the end , he wonders do I wake or sleep (80 )--because he flew with a bird , on the viewless wings of poesy (33 , for a few hours one morning - and all at once , his

sod (60 ) existence seemed entirely insignificant next to the immortal birdsong . Keats 's poem points out the seductive wonder of Nature , and calls into question humankind 's ability to understand the sublime fully - given our limiting mortality and short-sightedness . So in this sense Nightingale ' does a reversal on its Romantic themes , snatching back the human reigns of enlightenment . Oppositely , Hardy 's Darkling explores a world gone barren from the desolation of human folly , wherein the seed of new birth is rare . It was written around the turn of the 20th century , when the industrial age was just getting its grips in the tender Victorians , and Hardy was well-positioned to comment on the unraveling of Nature in the onset of technology . Unlike Keats 's nightingale , Hardy 's thrush symbolizes not the unattainable sublimity of the cosmos , but rather the unknowable beauty in a world fallen spectre-gray (Hardy line 2 )--where , The ancient pulse of germ and birth / Was shrunken hard and dry / And every spirit upon earth / Seemed fervourless as I (13-16 . In this way then , Hardy 's bird is a glimmer of hope for the future , in the absence of evidence for it - save for one small light in a wasteland of Winter 's dregs . Thus , while...