"The Darkling Thrush" (A Poem)

For millennia, the end of the year had invoked images of death as one time period closes and the other begins. The same, in turn, can be said for centuries, with the shift between one span and another prompting artists and thinkers to expound on the notions of death and rebirth. Such is the case with Thomas Hardy’s poem “The Darkling Thrush.” Published in the Graphic on December 29, 1900, the work utilizes the imagery of death to comment on the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth.[1]

 

I leant upon a coppice gate

When Frost was spectre-grey,

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 outburst 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 carollings

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.[2]

 

Works Referenced

 

Bloom, Harold, ed. Bloom’s Major Poets, Thomas Hardy: A Comprehensive Research and Study Guide. Philadelphia, PA: Chelsea House Publishers. 2004. 

 

Hardy, Thomas. “The Darkling Thrush.” Poems of the Past and the Present. London: Macmillan and Company, 1903. 169-171.

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[1] Bloom, 89-91.

[2] Hardy, 169-171.