Comment 4 of 5, added on November 27th, 2005 at 5:34 PM.

The thrush is literally in the dark and at one with his surroundings and nature; Hardy is figuratively in the dark and at odds with the world at large - he finally contrives to use the bird as his personal messenger of hope

Mary from United Kingdom

Comment 2 of 5, added on September 13th, 2005 at 11:20 AM.

I leant upon a coppice gate
When Frost was spectre-gray,
And Winter’s dregs made desolate
The weakening eye of day.
The tangled bine-stems scored the sky
Like strings of broken lyres,
And all mankind that haunted nigh
Had sought their household fires.

The land’s sharp features seemed to be
The Century’s corpse outleant,
His crypt the cloudy canopy,
The wind his death-lament.
The ancient pulse of germ and birth
Was shrunken hard and dry,
And every spirit upon earth
Seemed fervourless as I.

At once a voice arose among
The bleak twigs overhead
Ina full-hearted evensong
Of joy illimited;
An aged thrush, frail, gaunt, and small,
In blast-befuffled plume,
Had chosen thus to fling his soul
Upon the growing gloom.

So little cause for carolings
Of such ecstatic sound
Was written on terrestrial things
Afar of nigh around,
That I could think there trembled through
His happy good-night air
Some blessed Hope, whereof he knew
And I was unaware.
This poem is dated 31st December 1900. This fact has no relevance to the poetic merit of the work, but it is interesting that Hardy should write this particular poem on the eve of the new century. Indeed, the original title that Hardy gave the poem was By the Century’s Death-Bed. The new title, though, is more interesting. “Darkling” means literally in the dark. As Hardy would have known, the word is also used in King Lear, Matthew Arnold’s Dover Beach, Milton’s Paradise Lost and most notably in Keats’ Ode to a Nightingale. Once again, this has no relevance to the poem’s merit, but poets write in full recognition of the poetic heritage behind them. Indeed, Keats’ Ode provides a useful contrast to the Hardy poem. Like The Darkling Thrush, the ode opens in desolation:
My heart aches, and a drowsy numbness pains
My sense, as though of hemlock I had drunk,
Or emptied some dull opiate to the drains
One minute past, and Lethe-wards had sunk.
But, in reflecting on the nightingale, Keats is led to more positive thoughts, and the poem ends with an elegiac hope. Hardy’s, though, ends with a sense of loss. There is no sense of redemption. Keats’ poem is a poem of summer whereas Hardy’s is a poem of winter: Keats’ nightingale was, like poetry itself, immortal, whereas Hardy’s thrush is aged, frail and poetry only appears in the form of “broken lyres”. It is written in the meter of hymns yet this form falters and the poem is a hymn not to faith but to doubt. The gloom is “growing”. The poem closes not on “knew” but “unaware”.

Notice in the first stanza how Hardy establishes a sense of time, place and mood:
I leant upon a coppice gate
When Frost was spectre-gray,
And Winter’s dregs made desolate
The weakening eye of day.
The tangled bine-stems scored the sky
Like strings of broken lyres,
And all mankind that haunted nigh
Had sought their household fires.

The frost reminds Hardy of ghosts, since it is described as ‘spectre-gray’. A word like ‘dregs’ suggests ‘residue’ or ‘remains’. The light is not fading, but ‘weakening’ as if engaged in a conflict which it is losing. The bine-stems, instead of providing a lattice decoration for the sky, are said to ‘score’ it as if marking it off in angry gashes. The harmony of music is reduced to the ‘strings of broken lyres’. Hardy alone can see this scene, since everyone else was sensibly sitting round their household fire. This could have been an enchanting scene. Hardy could have gloried in the solitude, taken pleasure in the myriad shapes displayed by the frost, welcomed the soothing approach of night, and delighted in the patterns of the bine-stems. Instead he does the precise opposite, and intensifies the sense of gloom with the long vowel sounds at the end of every line. As an example of establishing a mood by the selection of evocative images, this first verse is superb.

Having set the scene, Hardy now reflects upon it. His musings do nothing to alleviate the gloom:
The land’s sharp features seemed to be
The Century’s corpse outleant,
His crypt the cloudy canopy,
The wind his death-lament.
The ancient pulse of germ and birth
Was shrunken hard and dry,
And every spirit upon earth
Seemed fervourless as I.

The fact that this poem was written on the 31st December 1900 does now become relevant, because, with the year coming to an end, Hardy sees the dismal features that he has depicted in the first stanza as being an emblem of the year itself. It is the end of the nineteenth century, and what does the twentieth promise? Not very much.
The ancient pulse of germ and birth
Was shrunken hard and dry,

Hardy is not just bidding goodbye to a century; it is as if he was mourning the death of creative vitality. Indeed, some critics have seen this poem as a lament for the death of Romanticism, as if Hardy was bemoaning the loss of the impulse that inspired Keats, Shelley, Byron and Wordsworth. Be that as it may, Hardy’s own sense of deprivation is so intense that he envisages it as infecting everyone:
And every spirit upon earth
Seemed fervourless as I.

There seems nowhere to go. Hardy seems to have backed himself into such a cul de sac of nullity that there is no escape. But then, almost like a miracle, the thrush appears:
At once a voice arose among
The bleak twigs overhead
Ina full-hearted evensong
Of joy illimited;
An aged thrush, frail, gaunt, and small,
In blast-befuffled plume,
Had chosen thus to fling his soul
Upon the growing gloom.

Upon the scene where everything is shrunken hard and dry, there comes a voice of ‘joy illimited’. The contrast could hardly be greater. Yet all the same, Hardy does much not to lose contact with his despondent mood. The thrush itself is aged, frail, gaunt and small. This does two things. It maintains the despondent aura whilst at the same time making the joy of the thrush even more miraculous. Note too how Hardy begins to invest this miracle with religious overtones. The thrush’s song is compared to evensong, a religious ceremony. The bird flings its soul upon the growing gloom. Since the soul was commonly seen as the immortal part of man, it is almost as if Hardy is seeing something eternal triumphing over the corpse of the century. This quasi-religious tone is reinforced with the word ‘caroling’ in the first line of the final stanza. Indeed, as that stanza makes clear, it is as if the thrush is reaffirming that the birth of Christ brought the hope of redemption to mankind:
So little cause for carolings
Of such ecstatic sound
Was written on terrestrial things
Afar of nigh around,
That I could think there trembled through
His happy good-night air
Some blessed Hope, whereof he knew
And I was unaware.


David Rothwell from United Kingdom