The land’s sharp features seemed to be
The Century’s corpse outleant,
His crypt the cloudy canopy,
The wind his death-lament.
In these four lines, "The Darkling Thrush" shifts from a description of the countryside with figurative significance to an explicit meditation on the end of the century. That meditation is mediated through the eyes of the speaker. Rather than employing either straightforward metaphor, or a traditional simile using “like” or “as,” the poem compares the land and the century through the conjunction “seemed,” suggesting that this comparison feels real, but only to the speaker. In a way, it's a simile for the reader, who recognizes this comparison as intentional and grounded in the poem, but a metaphor for the speaker, who experiences the comparison as more vivid and immediate. The terms of that comparison are a little complicated. The poem maps “the land’s sharp features” onto the death of the Century, suggesting that the harshness of the landscape serves as a visual representation for that death. The land thus becomes a kind of “corpse,” because it is the desolate body corresponding to the intangible death of the century’s soul. The poem then extends that metaphor into the rest of the natural world, perceiving the sky as its burial place, and the wind as its “death-lament,” or the sounds of people mourning. Rather than a one-to-one correspondence between the landscape and the Century, this metaphor depicts the Century as ultimately contained by the natural world.
At once a voice arose among
The bleak twigs overhead
In a full-hearted evensong
Of joy illimited;
An aged thrush, frail, gaunt, and small,
In blast-beruffled plume
Here, Hardy makes a distinction between the thrush as a physical being, and its song as a disembodied “voice…overhead.” The “bleak twigs” embody the hopeless physical landscape in which the speaker is trapped, which the “voice” of the thrush is able to transcend. The speaker clarifies that the thrush itself is “frail, gaunt, and small,” as weak and desolate a creature as the “bleak twigs” in which it sings. The onomatopoeia “blast-beruffled” emphasizes the thrush’s physicality, by projecting the sound of the wind onto the poem’s description of the bird’s body. In contrast, the thrush’s song is “illimited,” an archaic term which means free from limitation or restraint. In this case, the limitation is the thrush’s body, which does nothing to constrain the joy of its song. Hardy links that joy with religious practice by labeling the thrush’s call a “full-hearted evensong.” This line also emphasizes the unconstrained nature of the song, while also comparing it to music at an evening church service. The poem itself is set as day gives way to night, and this metaphor suggests that the thrush’s song has the power to transform that bleak physical reality into something joyful and religious.
So little cause for carolings
Of such ecstatic sound
Was written on terrestrial things
In these lines, the speaker summarizes the poem’s overarching depiction of the world as a joyless place. The first line, “So little cause for carolings,” is an example of alliteration in which the /k/ sound is repeated. This parallels lines 10 and 11, “The Century’s corpse outleant,/ His crypt the cloudy canopy…” which also repeat the /k/ sound. The parallel here amplifies the connection between the speaker’s hopelessness and the desolation of the physical world as he perceives it. However, this quote does not suggest that his perception is flawed. Instead, it draws a clearer distinction between corrupted “terrestial things” and the “ecstatic sound” which is so alien to the hopeless landscape that it must come from somewhere else.
The use of the word “written” in line 27 is also significant. Here, the poem refers to the act of writing, as it does with the reference to the “lyre” in the first stanza and its many allusions to literary history. By describing the landscape as "written on," “The Darkling Thrush” suggests that the world itself is a kind of poetry, but one in which only hopelessness and desolation can be read. The “carolings” of the thrush thus come to represent an alternate form of poetry rooted not in “terrestrial things” but rather a joy beyond the physical world.
And the May month flaps its glad green leaves like wings,
Delicate-filmed as new-spun silk, will the neighbors say…
These beautiful lines establish many of the central aesthetic concerns of “Afterwards.” Hardy employs alliteration three times in these two brief lines, repeating /m/ sounds in “May month, /g/ sounds in “glad green,” and /s/ sounds in “new-spun silk.” All this alliteration gives the lines a smooth, cohesive feeling which parallels the delicate chain of comparisons Hardy is making here between leaves, wings, and silk. The simile between leaf and wings in the first line carries over to the second stanza, where the poem speaks more explicitly of a bird which is itself compared to the “soundless blink” of an eye (5). The visual imagery in these two lines thus establishes a broader philosophy of the natural world in which all things are connected. In the later stanzas, the poem expands this way of thinking to connect its speaker to the natural world, and the world of living things on earth to the mysterious vastness of the heavens. However, the care and precision given to the imagery in lines two and three maintains that, despite these broader connections, each individual detail is also of importance.
And will any say when my bell of quittance is heard in the gloom
And a crossing breeze cuts a pause in its outrollings,
Till they rise again, as they were a new bell’s boom…
The phrase “bell of quittance” is another strange and antiquated way of referring to death. Here, Hardy seems to refer literally to the ringing of church bells to announce a funeral. However, the word quittance means the relieving of a debt or obligation. The third stanza suggests that that obligation was to provide for and protect “innocent creatures,” an obligation which his death relieves. This particular euphemism thus serves to cast death in a particularly positive light, as the removal of a burden rather than the ending of a life.
The poem’s description of the breeze furthers that theme. The word “rise” in line 19 parallels line 15 in the previous stanza, where the speaker wonders, “will this thought rise”? The poem suggests that the breeze is like a thought; both are intangible, and both carry some form of knowledge. The breeze, in this case, echoes the “bell of quittance,” suggesting that the natural world acts as a kind of church, similarly able to impart meaning to our lives and lift our burdens.
Saying that now you are not as you were
When you had changed from the one who was all to me
The confusing syntax of this quote serves to establish the complicated timeline which “The Voice” confronts. There are a few unusual dynamics at play here. First of all, the speaker establishes that the woman he misses is no longer “all to [him].” Indeed, he doesn’t even perceive the woman who died as the same “one” who he was in love with, because she had changed so much. This statement upends the expectations around the poetry of grief, because the speaker is not actually mourning the person who died, but rather a person who disappeared long before her death. The death thus puts him at two removes from that woman he loved. Secondly, he imagines that he not only hears her calling, but that she is telling him that she is now as she was when he loved her, rather than as she was when she died. In a way, then, her death actually returns his lover to him, because it replaces the changed woman with his memory of her as a youth. Yet, ironically, her death also places her permanently out of his reach. He can hear her young self calling, as he could not when she was alive, but that call is imagined and intangible.
Thus I; faltering forward,
Leaves around me falling,
Wind oozing thin through the thorn from norward
In these last lines, the speaker seems to leave behind the voice of his wife and to re-enter the bleak place where he stands. The word “faltering” is the first time the speaker performs a direct action, rather than simply listening to the woman or the breeze. The poem thus shifts here from depicting a man observing the world, to one who must contend with it for himself. Hardy employs dense alliteration here, which renders these lines especially vivid and puts additional weight on each word which repeats a familiar sound. His description illustrates an autumnal scene, one which parallels the poem’s thematic depiction of the world as an increasingly darker place; the speaker’s own relationship similarly moved, over the course of his life, from spring into a bleak winter.
