Summary
The poem begins by introducing its speaker, who tells the story of a moment he experienced while leaning against a gate in the countryside. It was dreary day towards the end of winter, and the setting sun was pale in the grey sky. The speaker looked up through a mesh of tangled plant stems, which he imagined as the broken strings of harps, and reflected that all the people who could be out in the desolate countryside had gone home to sit by the fire.
In the second stanza, the speaker begins to think more metaphorically. He sees the harsh features of the land as visual representations of the “Century’s corpse,” or the nineteenth century which was coming to an end as Hardy wrote this poem. Within this metaphor, the grey skies become the century’s tomb, and the wind its mourning song. The speaker continues in this bleak tone as he observes that the fertility of the land has given way to barrenness, and that every living thing seems to share his hopeless outlook.
Suddenly, within the overhanging tangle of dead plants, he hears a voice sing out joyfully, without a tinge of awareness of the bleakness the speaker perceives in the world. He looks up to see an old thrush, a type of songbird. The thrush looks small and weak, and its feathers are ruffled by the cruel winter winds. Night is coming on, yet the frail thrush chooses to sing out with a full voice into the “growing gloom” (24).
The speaker looks around, both near himself and far out, and can see no justification anywhere for such joyful singing. Because he can see “so little cause” for singing, and yet the thrush sings, the speaker concludes that it must know something he doesn’t. Although he sees room only for pessimism on earth, the little bird up in the night air must sense “Some blessed Hope” (31).
Analysis
The word “darkling” is an antiquated term that means growing dark or characterized by darkness. In the title of “The Darkling Thrush,” Hardy revives the word and uses it slightly differently, to describe a thrush who calls out in a night which is growing dark. The use of outmoded or even invented vocabulary is one of Hardy’s stylistic hallmarks—the characteristics which make his poetry sound unique. In the body of the poem, the phrases “coppice gate” and “corpse outleant” employ similarly antiquated, seemingly out-of-place vocabulary.
In the title, the use of the word “Darkling” to describe the thrush rather than the evening suggests that the songbird cannot be distinguished from its environment. Yet, by the end of the poem, it becomes clear that the thrush’s song stands totally in contrast to the gloominess of the day. In some sense, then, the title begins the arc of the poem by expressing a totally pessimistic perspective, one which is upended by the thrush’s hopeful song. Nevertheless, because “The Darkling Thrush” is the poem’s title, rather than its first line, it also functions as a label for the poem as a whole. In this sense, it suggests that even the thrush may not differ from the world it inhabits as much as its song seems to indicate.
“The Darkling Thrush” was first published on December 29th, 1900, but the manuscript indicates that it was likely written in 1899. The poem explicitly responds to the end of the nineteenth century, and expresses mourning at the loss of the past, and a pessimistic attitude towards the future. In the first stanza, Hardy sets up an allegory between a cold day and the end of the century. In a sense, the century becomes like one long year which comes to an end in winter. The term “coppice gate” situates the poem in the countryside, along a border between pastureland and woodland. The beginning of “The Darkling Thrush” announces that the poem is interested in rural spaces, and, by using the antiquated term “coppice,” also implicitly connects those spaces to the past. Given that the poem is focused on mourning the death of a century, we can infer that the poet feels a sense of yearning for old times, and for rural places.
Nevertheless, the poem does not represent this winter day in particularly flattering terms. Instead, Hardy presents the natural world as bleak and barren. The first stanza is especially geared towards creating a vivid image of the outdoors through dense visual imagery. The speaker refers to the “spectre-grey” frost, the “dregs” of winter, and the “desolate,” “weakening eye” of the sun, all in a few brief lines (2-4). In a more extended simile, he describes “the tangled bine-stems,” or criss-crossing twigs of some dead plant, as the “strings of broken lyres” (5-6). All this imagery combines to create a vivid picture both of the general scene, and the exact place where the speaker is standing. We understand that the poem is concerned both with the state of the world, and with the perspective of an individual speaker.
At the same time, these visual images also begin establishing the poem’s metaphorical and thematic dimensions. The phrase “spectre-grey” suggests death, as though “Frost” has become a ghost (2). The simile “Like strings of broken lyres” suggests the Classical poetic tradition by invoking the lyre, the archetypal instrument of Greco-Roman poets, who sang lyric verse (6). Lyric is a poetic genre in which an individual speaker narrates a personal emotional experience; “The Darkling Thrush” is, in fact, a fairly straightforward example of lyric poetry. By referring to lyres, the poem thus harkens back to the very beginnings of its own genre. Yet here the lyre strings are “broken.” Classical poetic tradition is under threat, and poetry seems to be dying along with the landscape.
The second stanza builds much more emphatically on the theme of the death of history. Hardy explicitly compares “the land’s sharp features” to “the Century’s corpse” (9-10). The speaker experiences the “desolate” landscape as the physical body of an otherwise intangible period of time. In the next few lines, Hardy further personifies the landscape as “the Century’s corpse” and imagines that the whole world becomes his gravesite. “The Darkling Thrush” does not mourn the end of one century while welcoming the birth of another. Instead, the speaker states that “the ancient pulse of germ and birth/ Was shrunken hard and dry” (13-14). Hardy refers here to the cycle of the seasons as “the ancient pulse of germ and birth.” For many, many centuries, seeds have germinated in the soil during winter, before sprouting in spring. Yet, now, that “pulse” has “shrunken hard and dry.” The land doesn’t just look “desolate” because it’s winter, but rather has actually grown barren—this year, no new seeds will sprout. In the poem’s metaphorical terms, this means that the speaker imagines that there will be no new century to replace the old. All the things that made the nineteenth century hopeful and exciting will disappear in the twentieth.
By describing a natural scene vividly, but casting it as “desolate” and barren rather than warming and sublime, Hardy implicitly responds to and riffs on the Romantic poetic tradition, which looked to nature for healing and to transcend the pain of mortal existence. Rural spaces are part of the past which “The Darkling Thrush” mourns; as such, they are themselves under threat, rather than merely beautiful places to visit and seek healing. Along with this implicit response to the Romantics as a whole, “The Darkling Thrush” alludes specifically to a number of poems, including Keats’s “Ode To a Nightingale.” In the Ode, the speaker addresses a nightingale whose song he overhears. The speaker describes the bird's song as “some melodious plot/Of beechen green” (9) and goes on to contrast the mortality and pain of human life with the beauty and immortality of the forest. Although the poem takes on a mournful air, it clearly depicts the nightingale, and the sublime natural world it represents, as free from the evils which make human life so hard.
We can feel pretty certain that Hardy was thinking of “Ode to a Nightingale” when he wrote “The Darkling Thrush” because Keats’s poem both explores similar themes and uses the obscure word “darkling.” Their two uses of “darkling” are descriptive of the differences between the poems as a whole. In “Ode to a Nightingale,” the speaker states “Darkling I listen; and, for many a time/ I have been half in love with easeful Death…” (60). Both poems are concerned with death, and both portray a sense of loss. Keats uses “darkling” to describe himself. It is the speaker who listens in the darkness, while the nightingale sings out, suggesting the light of spring. In contrast, Hardy uses “darkling” to describe the thrush. For him, the thrush is part of the darkness of the night, even though it offers hope beyond what the speaker can understand. Rather than drawing a delineation between man as stranded in darkness, with nature as a bright light of refuge, “The Darkling Thrush” suggests that the whole world is experiencing a kind of death, man and nature alike.
Although the Keats allusion is perhaps most central to “The Darkling Thrush,” the poem is famous for referencing a number of important canonical poems that describe birdsong. For example, Hardy was probably also thinking of Milton’s Paradise Lost, which also uses the word “darkling” while describing a nightingale calling out in the darkness. While it can be interesting to look at each of the allusions in “The Darkling Thrush” individually, it's also worth asking what the significance is of allusion as a whole. In the case of a poem responding to the end of the nineteenth century, Hardy seems to be invoking the history of poetry as part of that past; by using the archetypal poetic image of a bird calling out in the darkness, he includes himself in a long legacy of poets. Yet, by suggesting that the past is dying, he also implies that his poem is saying goodbye to the past, the last in a long string of poems.
That attitude is part of why Hardy is often identified with the beginnings of modernism, a movement most closely associated with early twentieth century writers like T.S. Eliot, Erzra Pound, James Joyce, Marianne Moore, and Gertrude Stein. Although these writers were highly experimental with language, they were also very concerned with the past. In “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” T.S. Eliot argues that all great writing must be explicitly connected to canonical literary history. At the same time, he mourned the loss of traditional thought, feeling that, in the modern era, the past could be accessed only as fragments. Although “The Darkling Thrush” follows a regular meter, and syntax which is pretty easy to understand, his poetry is understood as modernist because it is similarly committed to allusion and literary history, while presenting a somewhat nihilistic view of the present.
The third and fourth stanzas of “The Darkling Thrush” complicate the nihilistic view of the approach of modernity which the first two stanzas present. The call of the thrush breaks through “the bleak twigs overhead,” “the tangled bine-stems” from the first stanza. The first stanza established that those stems symbolize a “broken” poetic tradition, a tradition that began with classical sung poetry. The song of the thrush, by breaking through the “bine-stems,” is thus cast as a kind of poetic intervention. Unlike the “strings of broken lyres,” the thrush can sing out. A thrush calling out in the night is such an archetypal, even cliché, poetic image that it becomes less real bird than an accumulation of poetic history and tradition, a dimension Hardy emphasizes through the many literary allusions in “The Darkling Thrush.” When this embodiment of poetry sings out, it suggests that poetry itself, rather than nature, can bring light to the darkness of the twentieth century. The thrush might even represent the figure of Hardy himself.
Nevertheless, the general pessimism of the poem persists in its second half. Even as the thrush breaks through the barrenness of the scene with a fresh poetic voice, its body is “frail, gaunt, and small,” obviously affected by the desolation of its landscape. Unlike Keats’s nightingale, Hardy’s thrush doesn’t point to a larger natural world free of the sorrows of human life. The thrush is like a single bright light, almost overshadowed by “the growing gloom” of the world that surrounds it.
Instead, “The Darkling Thrush” finds hope in a more intangible place. Rather than the physical thrush, the poem focuses on its song, the “ecstatic sound” of its soul. Although Hardy himself was an atheist, the thrush’s song has some clearly religious overtones. The poem compares its voice to “a full-hearted evensong,” or the music of a Christian church service. The focus on the soul, and the phrase “some blessed Hope,” also resonates with Christian religious ideas, in which the soul outlives the body, and in which hope is sometimes depicted as only accessible through God. The poem’s separation between a “desolate” and hopeless “terrestrial” plane, and a heavenly “Hope,” suggests a rejection of worldly things in favor of Christian faith in redemption and eternal life beyond the Earth (27, 31).
However, God himself is strangely absent from “The Darkling Thrush.” The poem personifies “Frost,” “Winter,” the “Century,” and “Hope,” so that these natural and conceptual figures, rather than a Christian God, become the poem’s principal actors beyond the realm of humanity. The allusion to Milton might be especially relevant here. In Paradise Lost, the voice of God calls down to humanity in the Garden of Eden. Here, only the voice of a “frail” thrush pierces the “gloom.” Thus, although the poem argues that distance from earthly things might provide a way out of the gloom of the approaching twentieth century, it also suggests that heaven has become largely intangible and inaccessible, wavering and temporary as the song of a thrush.
