The Thrush’s Song (Symbol)
Throughout “The Darkling Thrush,” Hardy overlays literal and figurative registers. The poem depicts a real experience the speaker has in the natural world, and devotes lots of visual imagery to illustrating a specific bleak landscape and the little thrush which sings out in it. At the same time, Hardy explicitly connects those images to a broader metaphorical message, in which the landscape symbolizes the corpse of the nineteenth century. Similarly, the poem clarifies the figurative significance of the thrush by referring to his song as “some blessed Hope” (31). This reference draws a distinction between the thrush and its song. Although the poem depicts the thrush as a real bird—very much a part of the terrestrial landscape which the speaker can find no hope in—its song exists beyond the physical world, and comes to symbolize an intangible hope which remains accessible regardless of how grim the world is. The extended metaphor which compares the physical landscape to a tomb for the nineteenth century thus implies, conversely, that the thrush’s intangible song represents a hopeful force independent of the death of the century.
The Countryside (Motif)
“Afterwards,” “The Darkling Thrush,” and “The Voice” all take place in the countryside. Although the poems vary in their depictions, with “Afterwards” depicting the rural landscape as rejuvenating and persistent, while “The Darkling Thrush” depicts it as barren and hopeless, all three linger over descriptions of the natural world. Hardy himself grew up in rural England, and he strongly identified his work with Dorset, the small town where he grew up. Max Gate, the estate he built for himself and his first wife, was only a few miles from Dorset. Hardy, with his complex and lengthy relationship with rural places, thus depicts the countryside as endlessly varied in how it might be perceived. Nevertheless, it always appears as a place well-suited to poetic reflection, and worthy of careful observation.
The Wind (Motif)
In both “The Voice” and “Afterwards,” Hardy focuses on the sound of the wind. In “The Voice,” the wind speaks quite literally, becoming the voice of the speaker’s dead wife. The melancholy sound of the wind moving over the meadows both emphasizes the rural, wintry setting and provides a sonic image of the voice the speaker imagines he hears. In “Afterwards,” although the speaker never explicitly refers to the wind as a voice, it nevertheless seems to be the sort of sound which conveys meaning. In that poem, once again connecting wind to death, Hardy relates the sound of the wind to the clanging of the funeral bells. Part of what the speaker notices about the world is this eloquence of the wind, the way it speaks as effectively as the man-made church bells to the death which has just transpired.
