Thomas Hardy was a Victorian realist, greatly influenced by the Romantic poets who came before him but also caught in the skepticism and doubt that characterized the crisis of faith in the Victorian era.
Hardy followed in the footsteps of Romantic poets such as William Wordsworth and John Keats in the centrality of nature in his poetry. His love of the natural world was underscored by a fatalism and a bleak observation of the suffering in the world.
This tension is visible in Hardy’s poem “The Darkling Thrush,” one of his most famous works, which presents us with a sharp contrast between a harsh winter landscape, a dispirited observer, and the joyful song of the thrush.
The Darkling Thrush
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.
Read the rest of Marlena Figge’s column about the poem here.
