The Darkling Thrush: a poem by Thomas Hardy

“The Darkling Thrush” by Thomas Hardy (1840-1928) was published in the “Graphic” on 29th December 1900 and originally entitled “By the Century’s Death-bed”. Although it must have been written some days before that date, it was clearly intended to be read as though the poet was contemplating the closing of the final day of the 19th century (the Victorians had the good sense to realise that centuries begin with an “01” year, which their descendants 99 years later chose to ignore!)

The word “darkling” (meaning “in the dark”) only appears in Hardy’s revised title and not in the poem itself. It is a significant word in the context of understanding the poem, given that it was used in three poems with which Hardy was very familiar, and its use here was a deliberate reference to those earlier poems.

It appears in Book III of Milton’s “Paradise Lost” to describe a nightingale (“… the wakeful bird / Sings darkling…”), which was almost certainly why John Keats used the word in stanza six of his “Ode to a Nightingale” (“Darkling I listen …”). The third poem was “Dover Beach” by Matthew Arnold, in which one of the last lines reads: “And here we are as on a darkling plain / Swept with confused alarms”. There are definite echoes of all three poems in “The Darkling Thrush”.

The poem

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.

 

Discussion

Hardy’s poem comprises four eight-line stanzas in a standard ballad format of alternating tetrameters and trimeters (i.e. four and three stresses per line, respectively) having an ABABCDCD rhyme scheme. As might be expected with a ballad, the poem tells a story, with the first two stanzas setting the scene, the third describing the “action” and the fourth posing the question of what the action could mean. Thomas Hardy often experimented with poetic forms, but on this occasion he stuck with a tried and tested one which suited his needs admirably.

The theme of the poem is that the century is dying and the prospects for the next are far from certain. The 19th century had been one of great progress in many respects, but it had also undermined former certainties and left mankind in a state of bleakness and lack of understanding of the forces that science had revealed as being dominant in the world. One of the fixed points that had been removed as a buffer against doubt, for many intellectuals including Hardy, was religion and a sense of divine purpose. This was the basic theme of “Dover Beach”, mentioned above as a “darkling” poem.

The imagery of the poem is important in presenting these concepts. The setting is a coppice (a small wood) in the depth of winter, and the images of the first two stanzas suggest death and decay as well as cold. The frost is therefore “spectre-gray” and mankind does not “live” nearby but “haunt[s]”. The remaining hours of the day are “dregs” and the setting sun is a “weakening eye”. The twigs and stems that can be seen against the sky are “Like strings of broken lyres” that were typical images on Victorian grave-stones. 

In the second stanza the imagery is extended to include the “Century’s corpse” such that the leaden sky becomes the roof of a crypt in which the century’s tomb might be placed and the wind is its “death lament”. It is not just the century that has died; it has taken with it the certainties of the Christian religion. Just as Nature has shrivelled (“The ancient pulse of germ and birth / Was shrunken hard and dry”), so has human spirituality (“And every spirit upon earth / Seemed fervourless as I”).

And then, in the midst of all this gloom and destitution, a thrush sings out “In a full-hearted evensong / Of joy illimited”. This would have to have been a mistle thrush rather than the much commoner song thrush. The mistle thrush (also known as the storm cock) is renowned for singing in mid-winter, late in the day and in gloomy conditions such as those described in Hardy’s poem. 

The thrush’s song seems to be produced very much against the odds. The “aged” thrush is “frail, gaunt and small / In blast-beruffled plume”, but it has “chosen” to sing despite there being “So little cause for carolings”. As a symbol, the thrush can be seen as a contrary force to those of death and decay detailed earlier. It can represent the spirit of humanity that refuses to die along with the century and holds out the prospect of better times ahead, even though this might seem to be a forlorn hope.

The “blessed Hope” of which Hardy thinks the thrush is aware sounds, on the face it, like an optimistic view of a religious revival in the new century, when the doubts inspired by science and Darwinism would be set aside. However, the emphasis in Hardy’s words is that such a hope is irrational; it is the thrush that might have this hope, but the poet is not convinced. From the viewpoint of an agnostic humanist there was nothing to be gained from looking towards religion in order to gain hope for the future, as Milton would have done. The battered thrush is singing joyfully for no good reason and the song can therefore be rejected as a way forward. That said, the act of singing does have value in terms of being “a happy good-night air”, and man’s expressions of joy can do much to mitigate the drudgery of mechanical routine, but that is as far as it goes.

Hardy was more in sympathy with Keats, on hearing his nightingale, than with Milton. The parallels between Hardy’s poem and Keats’s are quite strong. For example, Hardy’s thrush “fling[s] his soul /Upon the growing gloom” whereas Keats’s nightingale “pours forth thy soul abroad”. Keats’s thoughts turn to death (“Now more than ever seems it rich to die”) and there is death imagery throughout Hardy’s first two stanzas, although Hardy stops short of Keats’s suicidal musings. “The Darkling Thrush” can therefore be seen as Hardy’s response to “Ode to a Nightingale”.