12.

09 6:22 PM
Darkling Thrush
The Darkling Thrush is one of Thomas Hardy’s characteristic poems of bleak despair
over the world, natural and emotional. It is the last poem of the 19th century, or
at least the last one to be discussed in this book, written on the last day of the
century, December 31, 1900. Because it is December, the gloomy weather of the day,
which is described in the poem, can stand for the century itself—both the one
coming to an end and the one about to start.

The day is characteristically gray. The question the poem implicitly poses—and the
question landscape and ambience always poses in Hardy, in both his poetry and his
novels—is the extent to which the mind is brought low by the exterior grimness of
weather and therefore of the surrounding world, of life, versus the extent to which
we see in the surrounding world a reflection of our own moods and emotions.

“The Darkling Thrush” not only raises this question but perhaps despite itself
answers it. For most of the poem, the landscape and the mood it is correlated with
are indeterminate as to cause and effect. The features of the landscape seem to
represent the corpse of the 19th century, gruesomely leaning out of its coffin,
perhaps through rigor mortis. But it may be that the grimness of the century is the
grimness of the passing of all time and the hopelessness of trying to impose human
meaning on an unforgiving and indifferent natural process.
We can get some hint that not everyone may feel as grim as Hardy does through the
fact that he is alone at the coppice gate: All other people have “sought their
household fires,” and while the landscape is inimical to them, it may be that the
interior lives of their homes have compensatory pleasures. On the other hand, the
fact that everyone sees nature as inimical might mean that Hardy is seeing the
truth of the world, not imposing his own depression onto it. Indeed, he goes on to
say “every spirit upon earth / Seemed fervourless as I.”

The poem is partly about the use or point of writing poetry in so bleak and inhuman
a universe. The land itself seems to be an allegory about the pointlessness of
poetry: “The tangled bine-stems scored the sky / Like strings of broken lyres.”

The broken lyres mean the breaking of the instrument of lyric poetry, the Aeolian
harp that Samuel Taylor Coleridge and William Wordsworth saw as the emblem for the
poetic mind’s relation to nature, and that Hardy’s favorite poet, Percy Bysshe
Shelley, tried to imagine as a metaphor for the forest of autumn and then himself
in the climax of “Ode to the West Wind.”

And yet the thrush—like the 60-year-old Hardy, “aged . . . frail, gaunt, and
small”—pours its soul abroad in “such ecstatic sound,” recalling John Keats’s
description of the nightingale singing in “such an ecstasy” in “Ode to a
Nightingale.” To that song Keats has listened “darkling,” while “half in love with
easeful death.” Darkling is Keats’s word as much as it is also John Milton’s, from
whom he derives it; in Paradise Lost Milton describes how he listens as the
nightingale “sings darkling.” The word means “in the dark,” but Hardy wants it to
mean “headed toward darkness.” The “darkling thrush” of the title refers both to
him, listening darkling, and the bird, singing darkling.

But we can see that the grimness of the poem is Hardy’s and not the world’s. The
logic of the poem is to some extent self-refuting. It goes like this: Why should I
not be bleak when the world around me is so demonstrably unvaried in its grimness?
How can the thrush sing in such circumstances?

But the thrush is one of the circumstances, and therefore it contradicts the
argument that the world is one of unvarying grimness. The hopelessness that the
poem and perhaps the poet recognize is one within the human spirit, not the natural
world. The thrush is singing a “happy good-night air” to the day, and not certainly
to the century. There is hope in and for the natural world, but no hope that the
poet can see for himself.

The first stanza posits a bleak and depressing landscape as the speaker leans on
the “coppice gate” and surveys the dismal scene. Indeed, the scene is devoid of all
forms of life, both natural and human. All that remains is a cold and colorless
world, “spectregray,” rendered nondescript and featureless by “the weakening eye of
day.” Even worse, the very memory of its former inhabitants has now been
obliterated. “And all mankind that haunted nigh / Had sought their household
fires.” But, most importantly, the joy and harmony of Nature have also departed,
where only “tangled bine-stems” of a previously vibrant plant remain, “like strings
of broken lyres,” mute symbols of a time as far back as the ancient world when
poetry and music were one, now become feeble reminders of their former exalted
status.

“It is not surprising that poets should wish to keep hold of an association with
song which goes back to the very origins of their art, and which carries with it
such powerful connotations of divine authority, potency, and vision. My argument is
that the wish became an anxiety during a period which begins, very roughly, with
Milton, and ends with a group of poets who straddle the end of the nineteenth
century and the beginning of the twentieth…. Why this loss of empire happened is a
fascinating and complex story, far to complex to analyze here … Nevertheless, I
think it is no coincidence that poets insisted on identifying themselves— self-
consciously, rhetorically—as singers at a historical moment of divergence between
poetry and song…. (Danny Karlin, “The Figure of the Singer in the Poetry of Thomas
Hardy”)

Amidst this barren background, in the second stanza the poet laments the death of
the nineteenth century by endowing it with human attributes, “the Century’s corpse
outleant,” and conceiving a funeral service attended only by the all but defunct
forces of nature. Here, the wind no longer produces the sweet music of the lyre
but, rather, provides the funeral dirge. “His crypt the cloudy canopy, / The wind
his death-lament.” Instead, the promise of renewed inspiration, “the ancient pulse
if germ and birth,” is buried in a wasteland that reflects the poet’s dejected
state of mind. “And every spirit upon earth / Seemed fervourless as I.” It is
important to note that the last two lines of this stanza indicate an important
reversal in terms of cause and effect with respect to nature and the poet’s state
of mind. Up to this point, the poet has presented himself as depressed by his
surroundings, whereas now he suggests that the landscape is a mirror for his
feelings, merely reflecting back to him his own sense of lost creativity. Thus, a
poem which at first appears to describe a rustic (NW) landscape is transformed into
one that uses the guise of Nature to express the poet’s emotional struggle.

Having buried the past century and his poetic precursors, the third stanza suggests
that there is yet some hope that the poet may find a way out of his dilemma when he
overhears the song of “an aged thrush.” It appears at first that there is indeed a
way of resolving his crisis as he listens to its “full-hearted evensong / Of joy
illimited,” where happiness without boundaries signals the successful transcendence
of his previous fears and anxiety. The poet imagines the thrush coming to his
rescue, having “chosen to fling his soul / Upon the growing gloom.” But for all
this, the poet’s desire for a renewed sense of well-being is not assured for he is
imagining an aged bird with “blast-beruffled plume.”

More importantly, the poet cannot participate in the thrush’s celebratory mood for
he cannot imagine any reason for its happiness. This is the theme of the fourth and
final stanza. Here, the poet simply cannot find any reason for hope or any way out
of his crisis. When he states that he cannot imagine any “cause for carolings / Of
such ecstatic sound,” we are made to understand that he can no longer be inspired
by the sound of the thrush’s singing, unable to identify with or be transported by
its music. His imaginative efforts to the contrary, the poet simply cannot find a
way out of his feelings of futility and hopelessness. “Some blessed Hope, whereof
he knew / And I was unaware.”

Bibliography
Bloom, Harold, ed. Thomas Hardy. New York: Chelsea House, 1987.
Clements, Patricia, and Juliet Grindle, eds. Poetry of Thomas Hardy. London: Vision
Press, 1980.
Hardy, Thomas. Thomas Hardy’s Personal Writings: Prefaces, Literary Opinions,
Reminiscences. Edited by Harold Orel. London: Macmillan, 1990.
Kramer, Dale, ed. Cambridge Companion to Thomas Hardy. New York: Cambridge
University Press, 1999.