Semansky is an instructor of literature whose writing appears regularly in literary journals. In this essay, Semansky considers modernist attitudes in Hardy's poem.

Critics have long called Hardy a transitional figure between the Victorian era and the modern world. Though it is easy to see the Victorian influences in his poetry, especially in his traditional verse forms and his nostalgia for older, simpler ways of living, it is often more difficult to see what makes him a modernist. In "The Darkling Thrush," written at the beginning of a new century, Hardy evokes some of the ideas and sentiments that would influence numerous subsequent poets such as Wilfred Owen, Philip Larkin, and W. H. Auden and that would help to shape modernist attitudes towards history and humanity. These include the representation of nature as a hostile (or, at best, an indifferent) force, a tolerance for contradiction, and a...