Explore the theme of death in the first two stanzas of "The Darkling Thrush."

In this poem by Thomas Hardy, the poet makes use of a pathetic fallacy to evoke the depressive mood. A pathetic fallacy personifies nature to imbue it with the mood or emotions the writer wishes to convey. The scene described is in the "dead" of winter, and the poet describes the features of the evening in terms of death. The first stanza hints at death relatively subtly. Ghosts are suggested by the terms "spectre-grey" and "haunted." The "strings of broken lyres" that score the sky suggest ancient angelic harps that have fallen into disrepair.
In the second stanza, more overt death imagery is evident. Looking across the landscape before him, the speaker imagines a body laid out. This could be the undulations of low hills that seem to form the silhouette of a corpse. The poet, writing in 1899—the final days of the nineteenth century—identifies this landscape-corpse as belonging to the expiring 1900s. The low-hanging gray clouds become "his crypt," and the sound of the wintry wind serves as a funeral dirge or mourner's wail. During the depths of winter, spring seems but a distant memory, as the poet acknowledges by describing the "ancient pulse of germ and birth" as "shrunken hard and dry." Any sign of new life is shriveled like death due to winter's grip.
In the first two stanzas of "The Darkling Thrush," Harding uses a pathetic fallacy and metaphors related to death to create a somber, depressive, and even eerie mood.