How do the poets Thomas Hardy and T. S. Eliot make use of settings and places to signify their central concerns?

Whilst explaining my response I would highlight the use of the different assessment objectives in my answer, to show where my answer is picking up marks on the mark schemeSettings and places can be used by writers not only to build a scene for their texts to take place in, but also to illustrate the main themes behind their writing. Both Hardy and Eliot use settings to convey their central concerns with time - in 'The Darkling Thrush' and 'Preludes' - and relationships - in 'The Voice' and 'The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock'. Such concerns reflect the contexts of the changing industrial world and nature of men and women's relationships - which are present in both Hardy's late 19th century and Eliot's modernist 20th century. In 'The Darkling Thrush', Hardy uses the setting of the poem to convey his concern with time; his fear of change, rooted in his desire for his beloved natural world to remain the same. Hardy uses a semantic field of death and decay to create an image of a "spectre-gray", "desolate" and "tangled" landscape. These diction choices convey a broken world, where things that Hardy once saw as beautiful and eternal have been ruined by the changing industrialisation of England at the turn of the 20th century. Here the setting is used to suggest that time is moving forward, leaving nature behind to decay. This concern for the passing of time is expressed further in the hymn-like structure of the poem, a strange choice as a hymn is traditionally used to praise god. Hardy could, therefore, be using this structure ironically - using the setting of the "desolate" landscape as a funeral for the old world - a reading that is further implied by the original title for the poem: 'By the Century's Deathbed'.Whereas Hardy uses settings and places to convey his dismay at the passage of time, in his poem 'Preludes', Eliot uses them to convey the repetitive dragging of time, illustrating the repetitive nature of human existence. The opening of the poem is set in the evening at "six o'clock". Emphasised by the use of the form 'free verse', the short line length and end-stop draws attention to the setting of the evening, going on to describe it as "the burnt-out ends of smokey days". This metaphor conveys the ennui experienced by urban workers; illustrating how all their energy and drive is gone by this point in the evening. Some critics have argued that this alludes to the context of the modernist world, as people began to question to repetitive existence of the working man - especially in Russia where the revolution was beginning to take shape.