The Darkling Thrush

            By Thomas
Hardy

            
               (posted Wednesday, June
24, 1998)
            

            To hear Robert Pinsky read
"The Darkling Thrush," click .

            As the turn of a millennial
century approaches, many works of art in various media will respond to that
rotation of the calendar. It will be hard for a poet to surpass the poise and
penetration of Thomas Hardy's "The Darkling Thrush," which is dated as being
composed on the last evening of the 19 th century.

            The delightfully vivid bird,
with its blend of comedy and pathos, may be Hardy's bow of his head toward such
Romantic birds as the nightingale heard by John Keats in his great "Ode to a
Nightingale" much earlier in the century.

            Words and
phrases like the repeated "seems," "I could think," and "I was unaware" enact
Hardy's somewhat skeptical holding back from a declaration that the natural
surroundings reflect his mood or the human calendar. The way the first half of
the poem ends with the word "I" also makes me feel a recognition that the
fervorless or haunted or corpselike quality of the landscape--like the bird's
putative "hope" later--is something that the subjective observer at least half
creates.

            
               --Robert Pinsky
            

            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 nighHad 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 fervorless as I.

            At once a voice arose
among     The bleak twigs overheadIn 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 soundWas written on terrestrial things     Afar
or nigh around,That I could think there trembled through     His happy
good-night airSome blessed Hope, whereof he knew     And I was unaware.

            
               Dec. 31,
1900