Answer the following briefly.

What do the thrush and the poet have in common?

In Thomas Hardy's "The Darkling Thrush," published at the close of the nineteenth century, the speaker leans on the gate to a cultivated wood and considers the dreary, hopeless feeling of midwinter. He begins to hear a bird sing joyfully and concludes that there must be something more, some otherworldly hope that is hidden beyond the bleakness he finds in the visible world. The deeply-entrenched moral values stifled free thinking, and filled the average person’s life with needless misery. Hardy loathed such an archaic set up, but he could do nothing to reverse it, other than venting his desperation through his writings. The Darkling Thrush, perhaps, bears the marks of Hardy’s anguish and pessimism.