Thomas Hardy's poems "At the Word Farewell" and "The Darkling Thrush" have nature featured heavily within them. It is used in both physical and metaphorical terms. Nature is used in many ways to signify himself or something that he knows and remembers. "The Darkling Thrush" was written the night of the turning of the century. The century itself is described by the use of nature. In "At the Word Farewell" nature is used in many ways, to describe his wife, the surrounds that Hardy is remembering. Hardy uses nature to intensify an image, for example in "At the Word Farewell  he describes a "clammy lawn." This means that the image of their final night and the setting that it is in is finalised in our heads. The fact that it is a "clammy" lawn could signify that the mood is not happy but is "clammy," not damp but not dry. Time is another theme that flows throughout many of Hardy's poems and nature is related to time, as in "The Darkling Thrush" when he writes "an aged thrush, frail, gaunt and small. This shows that as time goes on nature grown with it, the nature is signifying Hardy himself within this quotation and the way he is growing old, not unlike the thrush. Within "At the Word Farewell" nature is used to show beauty, for example the quotation "She looked like a bird from a cloud  shows that the women that Hardy is writing about is being likened to an angel, being almost ethereal. Nature can also alter perspective for example in "The Darkling Thrush" - "The lands sharp features "seem feverlous as I." This makes the reader feel as if even though it is coming to the end of the century Hardy doesn't care so why should we? At the start of the second stanza the land is representing the century and how it is almost dying as the century dies out. Hardy's view according to this stanza is that after the century's end there will be no light. We see this when he writes "the ancient pulse of germ and birth, was shr