"De-composing the Divine: The Death of God in Arthur Hugh Clough's 'Easter Day' and Thomas Hardy's 'God's Funeral"

The article explores the sceptical stance towards orthodox Christianity in Arthur Hugh Clough and Thomas Hardy through a comparative analysis of the poems “Easter Day” and “God’s Funeral”. Both poems dramatise religious dilemmas in terms of a tension between orthodox representation and individual response. Besides underlining their different stages in the loss of religious faith, which has its philosophical roots in T.H. Huxley’s rational agnosticism, the central part of the article pinpoints, through a detailed intertextual analysis, fascinating convergences as well as essential differences in terms of the prosodic-rhetorical features and thematic representation of the poems, most important of which is represented by the painful denial of the Resurrection in Clough and the cynical acknowledgement of the death of God in Hardy.