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The Darkling Thrush: A Centennial Appreciation

by A. E. Stallings

f course, not everyone celebrated the birth of a new millennium on January 1, 2000. By traditional reckonings, a century embarks not on the year zero, but on the year one. Thus, for many, the end of the old century is December 31, 2000.

Though Hardy's famous poem, "The Darkling Thrush," first appeared in print a couple of days prior to the last day of the 19th century, Hardy later chose to affix the date itself, December 31, 1900, to the lyric. Usually printed at the bottom of the poem, that date has become almost a member of it, a numerical refrain lest we forget the momentous occasion that instigated the verse. Hardy was watching the sun set on one century, and dawn on another:

The Darkling Thrush

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
In a full-hearted evensong   
Of joy illimited;
An aged thrush, frail, gaunt, and small,   
In blast-beruffled 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 or nigh around,
That I could think there trembled through   
His happy good-night air
Some blessed Hope, whereof he knew   
And I was unaware.

The poem opens with blow after blow of ominous images, similes, and metaphors. Frost is gray as a ghost, Winter has dregs, as if the year were a drink that has been consumed down to the bitter lees. The sun is a weakening eye (indeed the meter weakens on "weakening," with a tremulous anapest). Stems are like strings of broken lyres. The lyre (or harp), has an ancient association with poetry itself, as well as song. It is as if poetry itself is broken, music itself is out of tune. The very landscape has becomes the pinched face of a corpse withered in death.

The poem owes much of its power to the economy of diction. Meaning accretes with each word choice. Mankind does not linger near their household fires, but "haunts" them. Hardy speaks not of every person upon earth, but every "spirit," and they are "fervourless"--not just without passion, but literally without warmth, as the bodies of the dead.

When we read, "The ancient pulse of germ and birth," what springs first to mind is the pulse of the heart, the rhythm of life. But "pulse" also has an agricultural meaning--pods such as beans and peas--which would seem to refer to resurrection and new life ("If Winter comes can Spring be far behind?"), but instead, we have a pulse "shrunken hard and dry." Indeed, Hardy is careful not to say seed, but "germ" (which had already, in the mid-19th century, acquired a sinister association with disease, in addition to wholesome "germination"). The thrush sings an "evensong," the vespers service of an Anglican church. And it is not just singing, but, as if at Christmas, "caroling."

But perhaps one of the most interesting word choices in the poem is in the title. At first read, we might assume that "darkling" here is just an archaic or poetic way of saying "dark." But a quick glance at darkling's impressive poetic pedigree (it appears in Shakespeare's King Lear, Matthew Arnold's "Dover Beach," Milton's Paradise Lost, Keats' "Ode to a Nightingale") demonstrates that it is nearly always an adverb. Thus the title, translated into contemporary idiom, would be "The Thrush in the Dark."

Although Hardy was fond of including archaic and dialect words (part of his deliberate way of leaving rough edges on a poem, for an effect of spontaneity: one thinks also of such clunky coinages as "Powerfuller" and "Doomsters"), there is more to the choice than whim. Of the places where "darkling" occurs in the canon, two are in the context of birds, and the nightingale in particular. In Milton's Paradise Lost, iii.38-41, we have: "as the wakeful Bird/ Sings darkling, and in shadiest Covert hid/ Tunes her nocturnal Note." It is thus no coincidence that "darkling" should show up in Keats' "Ode to a Nightingale:" "Darkling I listen; and, for many a time/ I have been half in love with easeful Death."

Of course, to mention "The Darkling Thrush" and "Ode to a Nightingale" in the same breath is a commonplace, just for the curious tie of the rare word "darkling" and the symbolic bird in both poems. But on closer inspection, the correspondences between the two poems are startling. Keats' poem likewise opens with desolation: "My heart aches, and a drowsy numbness pains/ My sense, as though of hemlock I had drunk." Its third line also contains a reference to dregs: "Or emptied some dull opiate to the drains." And its bird is also described as "happy," "'Tis not through envy of they happy lot,/ But being too happy in thine happiness."

Verbal echoes are many: Keats' bird sings in "full-throated" ease; Hardy's in "full-hearted" evensong. One poem contains "spectre-thin," the other, "spectre-gray;" one contains the word "ecstasy," the other "ecstatic;" "gloom" or "glooms" appear in each. Both are set near a wood ("forest-dim," "coppice gate.") The song of thrush and nightingale are alike described in religious terms: Keats' "high requiem" and "anthem;" Hardy's "evensong" and "caroling." (Though religious references in Keats' poem tend towards the pagan, while those in Hardy's perhaps more Christian.) In a marked parallel, Hardy's bird "had chosen thus to fling his soul/ Upon the growing gloom," while Keats addresses his nightingale which is "pouring forth thy soul abroad/ In such an ecstasy!" (One also thinks of Shelley's skylark, which "Pourest thy full heart/ In profuse strains of unpremeditated art.")

Of course there are a number of points where the poems differ as well, only thrown into higher relief by the similarities. Keats' is a poem of summer, Hardy's of the meager winter days. Keats' bird, like Poetry itself, is "immortal," while Hardy's thrush is aged, frail, probably nearing the end of its life (and Poetry appears only in the context of "broken lyres"). In both poems, the song of the bird takes the narrator out of himself. Yet at the end of Keats' poem, the narrator is pulled back into introspection from ecstasy ("Forlorn!") when the bird's song vanishes, while Hardy's poem ends with the bird awakening the narrator out of his depressed meditation. But though the poems travel almost opposite arcs, they both resolve, or rather fail to resolve, in curious ambiguity. Keats' poem ends with uncertainty: is he awake or dreaming? Hardy's appears to end on an optimistic note, but, in fact, the poem has no moral resolution; it closes in "neutral tones."

The son of a violinist and a bookish mother, Thomas Hardy intended to go into the church as a youth. But he suffered a crisis of faith from which he never recovered. He became instead an architect, novelist and poet. A nostalgia for his lost faith imbues many of his lyrics, such as the lovely Christmas poem, "The Oxen." And it lies at the bottom of "The Darkling Thrush" as well.

Written in the gentrified cousin of ballad meter, common meter, the meter of hymns (it can be set to any number of familiar tunes), "The Darkling Thrush" is, in a way, a hymn not to faith, but to doubt. (Agnosticism was very much in the late-Victorian air; despite the word's ancient Greek roots, it was coined by Thomas Huxley in 1889.) True, the poem would seem to end on a note of hope, but it is a hope carefully qualified, a mere "trembling" through the bird's "happy good-night air." And all the evidence "written" around in the landscape points to the contrary. To read this as a poem of pure optimism is to ignore the carefully-layered gloom of the opening (a gloom which is "growing"), the actual condition of the thrush (aged, gaunt, frail), and especially the qualification "that I could think." That the thrush may somehow be conscious of a "blessed Hope" of which the narrator is not, is not a statement of fact; rather, a fond wish; optative. The poem closes not on "knew," but on "unaware."

But to read it as a poem of pessimism is, of course, likewise misguided. The poem does proffer a possibility of hope, however tentative. The bird does sing with "joy illimited." Whether this joy is ultimately unfounded, we are left not knowing. But even if we end the poem as "in the dark" as the narrator, we leave it briefly uplifted. Indeed, Hardy bristled at charges that his work was pessimistic. Rather, he considered himself an "evolutionary meliorist:" for things to improve, first the worst had to be looked square in the face. In his "Apology" to Late Lyrics and Earlier, he declared that "what is to-day, in allusions to the present author's pages, alleged to be 'pessimism' is, in truth, only such 'questionings' in the exploration of reality, and is the first step towards the soul's betterment." Perhaps what makes the "The Darkling Thrush" seem so modern, these long years after its writing, is its resistance to facile interpretation, its refusal to come to a pat conclusion. "The mission of poetry," Hardy declared, "is to record impressions, not convictions."

"The Darkling Thrush" looks to a new century, not only in its subject, but in its style. If a Hardy poem seems rough hewn (awkward syntax, words with the country soil still clinging to their roots), it is not by ineptitude, but by design. "Inexact rhymes now and then are far more pleasing than correct ones," he claimed; and he detested a "style like a worn half-pence--all the fresh images rounded off by rubbing..." He was striving not for the sterile virtue of perfection, but for an effect of spontaneity, warts and all. He and A. E. Housman who, with their colloquial diction and plain speaking, are among the first modern poets, showed a way out of the smoothly-wrought and gilded bars of high Victorian verse to a poetry of the new century.

Yet, in "The Darkling Thrush," with the bleak landscape described as the corpse of the 19th century, Hardy clearly looked forward to the 20th with anxiety. Not, it turns out, without good reason, for the century would prove a brutal one. Towards the end of his life, in the aftermath of World War 1, he would write this epigram:

Christmas: 1924

"Peace upon earth!" was said.  We sing it,
And pay a million priests to bring it.
After two thousand years of mass
We've got as far as poison-gas.

Ezra Pound famously remarked, poetry is news that stays news. At the centennial of its publication, Hardy's "The Darkling Thrush" seems curiously contemporary. As Hardy did, we enter a new century (and millennium) with trepidation. Perhaps we too are "darkling." May we find we have better grounds for hope now than Europe, on the brink of two devastating world wars, did a hundred years ago.

Selected Bibliography:

Contributer Notes: A. E. Stallings is an American poet currently residing in Greece. Her first collection, Archaic Smile, is the recipient of the Richard Wilbur Award, and is published by the University of Evansville Press. Her work has been awarded a Pushcart Prize, the Eunice Tietjens Prize from Poetry, the James Dickey Award from Five Points, and been included in Best American Poetry, 1994. She also has work forthcoming in Best American Poetry, 2000.

© A. E. Stallings