Hope in a New Year: Thomas Hardy’s ‘The Darkling Thrush’

A January photo of an icy forest in winter augments the gloom of Thomas Hardy's poetry. Public Domain

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 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.

Novelist and poet Thomas Hardy published this ode in 1900 as a reflection upon the turn of the century. Wrapped in solitude and scraped by the wind’s talons, the poem’s speaker looks out on winter’s lonesome desolation and seems to see in it a metaphor for the decline of the century, the decline of poetry, and perhaps the decline of civilization itself.

But an unexpected turn halfway through the poem introduces a note of hope.

A portrait of Thomas Hardy, 1893, by William Strang. Oil on panel; 17 inches by 15 inches. National Portrait Gallery, London. Public Domain

A Bleak Outlook

The poem is marked by endings: the end of the day, the end of the year, and the end of the century. It is perhaps for this reason that the opening stanzas contain so much imagery relating to death, aging, and decay. The “spectre-grey” of the frost suggests aging human hair, all wintry white. When Hardy referred to the absence of other human spectators to the bleak winter scene, he doesn’t speak of those who “live nigh”—the more natural word-choice—but rather those who “haunted nigh.” This phrasing suggests that the human inhabitants of that barren place are themselves in some sense already dead, like the past century, spirits wafting through a landscape as barren as the moon.

The death imagery becomes more explicit in the second stanza, where Hardy compares the landscape to “the Century’s corpse outleant.” The word “outleant,” meaning “leaning out,” echoes the first line of the poem, where the speaker describes himself leaning against a gate. As literary critic Oliver Tearle noted, this makes the speaker “a part of the scene, not just a detached observer.” It associates him with the deathly state of the countryside and the dying of the century, thus reflecting his internal hopelessness. Indeed, throughout the poem, the grim setting establishes the tone and serves as a mirror for the poet’s despair.

Continuing the corpse metaphor, Hardy compares the slate-colored sky to the Century’s crypt and the wind to its funeral song. Any germ of fertility the earth might possess is “shrunken hard and dry,” invisible and completely inaccessible. Rebirth seems all but impossible.

Why such a pessimistic view of the close of the century? In this poem, Hardy joined a poetic tradition that included Matthew Arnold and T.S. Eliot. The tradition lamented many of the changes in the modern world, even as it rejected some aspects of the past. The increasing speed of technological change combined with philosophical skepticism had rewritten the world in profound ways during the 19th century.

Tearle wrote, “Hardy seems to subject the Victorian age to sharp scrutiny, analysing its developments and discoveries in an indirect but suggestive way. ... Because of such scientific and philosophical developments and discoveries in the nineteenth century, religious faith had declined among the overall population. ... A writer like Hardy could no longer take solace from Christianity, or have unequivocal confidence in the future of the world.”

Hardy connects his work to Victorian poet Matthew Arnold’s work through the use of a key word: “darkling” (meaning “in darkness” or “becoming dark”). This word carries significant poetic meaning and history. Arnold used it in his poem “Dover Beach” about the decline of faith in the modern era. The term links the two poems, which share certain thematic similarities. Because of its skepticism, pessimistic outlook, and focus on the decline of faith, some have called “Dover Beach” the first modern poem.

Before Arnold, romantic poet John Keats used the word “darkling” in his reflection on art and mortality in “Ode to a Nightingale,” deriving the term, in turn, from Milton. Hardy thus linked his ode to Keats’s, too—and not just through that all-important word, but also by writing about a symbolic bird and its song, partly as a way to explore the nature of poetic inspiration.

While Keats’s nightingale stood for the poetic art itself and its powerful ability to transcend suffering, some critics have read the thrush in Hardy’s poem as a symbol of the poet himself—who was also somewhat “aged,” “frail” and “gaunt” when he wrote this poem. Like the thrush, Hardy had unlocked an unexpected flow of poetic “song” at the end of his life, as Carol Rumens has pointed out.

"The Allegory of Poetry" by Raffaello. Poetry is often characterized as a person or animal that represents the whimsical and lasting elements of the human spirit. Parroll/CC BY-SA 3.0

The Valuation of Hope

This reading of the bird’s symbolism becomes even more powerful when we consider that poetry as a dominant art form had been in decline for several centuries by the time Hardy published. It may be that he considered himself a last “blast-beruffled” bard, pouring out a final poetic song before the total demise of poetry in the wintry landscape of modernity.

We can gather that the failure of poetry is on Hardy’s mind from the “strings of broken lyres” simile in line 6. The lyre has long been associated with the art of poetry, so the symbolism of a broken lyre implies its ruin. It’s partly this failure of poetry that contributes to Hardy’s dim view of the past century, reflected in the dreary winter landscape. As critic Nasrollah Mambrol said, the broken lyres are “mute symbols of a time as far back as the ancient world when poetry and music were one, now become feeble reminders of their former exalted status.” With this in mind, the sudden singing of the thrush might suggest the hope that poetry is not dead yet after all, even in a modern environment that is often hostile to it.

Because Hardy’s writing is often pessimistic, the poem’s hopeful turn of the poem—when the bird begins to sing—is all the more interesting and inspiring. It’s interesting to note, too, that Hardy changed the title of the poem from “By the Century’s Deathbed” to “The Darkling Thrush,” thus emphasizing the hopeful aspects of the poem.”

Taking into account everything Hardy builds up in the first stanzas—the bleak landscape, the deathly imagery, the references to Matthew Arnold and declining faith, the pessimism surrounding the 19th century, the failure of poetry, and fears over humanity’s future, the appearance of the thrush and his “joy illimited” becomes all the more striking and inspirational.

Everything shifts in stanza three, too, when “A voice arose among/ The bleak twigs overhead.” This shift reminds readers of the “turn” or “volta” in a Shakespearean sonnet. The turn  occurs when Shakespeare suddenly moves in a positive or hopeful direction after a stretch of morose musings.

In addition to symbolically connecting the bird to the poet himself, the thrush’s description in the penultimate stanza as “aged,” “frail, gaunt, and small,” and “blast-beruffled” suggests the fragility of hope and beauty in a harsh world. But that shouldn’t surprise us. Indeed, hope, by definition, exists concurrently with apparent doom. It lives in the face of, in defiance of, despair, and it means the most when there is good reason to despair.

In Hardy’s poem, the bird’s vulnerability makes its “full-hearted” song all the more powerful and moving. The poetic paradox is this: The bird is tiny, fragile, about to be blown away by the lamenting wind, yet somehow, at the same time, the bird and its song are stronger than all the darkness and the bitter cold.

A hermit thrush fluffs its feathers to stay warm in Ottawa, Canada. Dger/CC BY-SA 3.0

In the poet’s words, the thrush sings “a full-hearted evensong,” a term referring to a liturgical evening prayer. Hardy also refers to the song as “carolings” and references “ecstasy.” This word-choice gives the bird a hint of religious significance, despite the fact that Hardy had lost his Christian faith long before writing the poem.

Is the “blessed Hope, whereof he knew/ And I was unaware” a religious hope, or something else? The answer is ambiguous. Hardy likely doesn’t know either—after all, he’s “unaware” of exactly what the Hope is. Yet with his poetic intuition, he senses the hope in a literal and metaphorical half-light—a movement, a stirring, a song. Perhaps things aren’t as bleak as they appear.

Mambrol wrote, “But we can see that the grimness of the poem is Hardy’s and not the world’s. The logic of the poem is to some extent self-refuting. It goes like this: Why should I not be bleak when the world around me is so demonstrably unvaried in its grimness? How can the thrush sing in such circumstances? But the thrush is one of the circumstances, and therefore it contradicts the argument that the world is one of unvarying grimness.”

The thrush is proof that the beauty, goodness, and miraculous life of the world is not yet spent. There is one piece of the puzzle that does not fit with Hardy’s own dismal autopsy of the past century and dismal predictions about the future: the bird, and its song. And Hardy is an honest enough poet to admit it.

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