Browning's “first,
fine, careless rapture" is heard agin here, but with a very different
effect. The title alone suggests a more
sombre note – the thrush is “Darkling”
as it is singing as it grows dark, the dark being a metaphor for the end of the
year, the end of the century (it was written in 1900) and the end of the
certainties of the Victorian era. “Darkling” also is a word much used by
poets – most notably Keats (in another poem written to a bird – “Ode to a Nightingale” - in which he describes his mood as “Darkling”) and, closer to Hardy in time,
Matthew Arnold. In his famous poem, “On Dover Beach” (publ. 1867), which is
also in the anthology, Arnold writes:
And we are here as on a
darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight
Where ignorant armies clash by night.
Arnold’s
answer to this bleak vision of mankind is to be “true to one another”.
An
atheist from an early age, Hardy was nevertheless spiritual in his search for
meaning in life, his desire to understand the forces working for good and evil
among mankind, and his belief in the power of redemption through love and
fellow feeling. “The Darkling Thrush” seems also to find Hardy at his lowest ebb, writing
at the end of the 19th century, whilst the Boer War dragged on, and contemplating
a doubtful future. Hardy had a deep, spiritual connection to
the English landscape; in his novels, like “Return
of the Native” or “Tess”, the
Wessex countryside is as important as the characters. For Hardy to personify the landscape as a dead
corpse is testimony to the depth of Hardy’s despair.
The
poem is in alternating iambic tetrameter
and iambic trimetre lines, or ballad
metre, with the expected regular ababcdcd
rhyme scheme. This may seem an odd
choice for a poem which is non-narrative and lyrical. However, it is the contrast between the potentially
jaunty rhythm and rhyme and the darkness of the subject matter, as well as the
manipulation of the syntax to emphasise particular words, that make the poem so
effective.
I
leant upon a coppice gate
When Frost was
spectre-grey,
And
Winter's dregs made desolate
The weakening eye of day.
The poet is out at twilight in winter and
stops on his walk to rest, leaning on a gate which leads to a small wood (“coppice”). The first stanza depicts the frozen, empty
landscape which is quickly imbued with a feeling of dread. The “Frost”,
personified by the capitalisation to suggest its pervasive power, as is “Winter”, is like a ghost (“spectre-grey”); “dregs” means what is left over and has no goodness; the sun is pale
and warmth less (“weakening eye”) and
also “desolate”, like a blind
sightless thing.
The
tangled bine-stems scored the sky
Like strings of broken
lyres,
And
all mankind that haunted nigh
Had sought their household
fires.
Not only is this landscape cheerless, but
the imagery in the next four lines suggests that the world itself is “out of
tune”. “tangled bine stems” are the curling tendrils of a plant – possibly woodbine or honeysuckle, a climbing
plant which entangles itself in low bushes and trees – which can be seen
against the leafless branches. The lyre
is a stringed instrument from classical Greece (from which the word “lyric” comes) which lifts this very
English scene into the realm of the time less and universal. The word “scored”,
here meaning to make deep cuts, another bleak image, may also be a punning reference
to music. This universality is
reinforced by the use of “mankind”,
rather than “men”. The use of “haunted” rather than “lived”
again suggests that, as Hamlet says, “the
time is out of joint”, at odds with itself.
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.
The imagery of death and decay continues,
transforming the English landscape into the stuff of nightmares. He sees the land before him as the embodiment
of the 19th century, which has just “died”. “Outleant”
appears to be a neologism by Hardy, presumably meaning “lent out”, as if the
dying century has inhabited the landscape and died there, its “features” thin
and wasted to show the “sharp” bones
beneath. The tomb of the Century is the
leaden grey, cloud-covered sky and the shrieking of the winter wind the wailing
of mourners. The alliterated “crypt/cloudy/canopy” suggests the hard
edges of a stone tomb. The life-force of
the land - “germ” means “seed” – is shrivelled
up. Mankind wanders this barren
landscape as a homeless spirit, aimless and energy-less – as Hardy does. Overall, it is vision of decay and
hopelessness, of which he is the epicentre.
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.
Suddenly, the silence is broken by a “voice”.
Whose is not yet known, as if Hardy is searching for the source in the “bleak twigs overhead”. The “l” sound in “bleak” is the first in a series of alliterated “l” sounds that
continue throughout the stanza. The transformation that this “voice” brings, however, is immediately
apparent – it is “full-hearted”, in
contrast to the lifeless corpses wandering around, and it sings an “evensong”, here meaning a “song sung in
the evening”, but also the religious service held daily in church, suggestive
of people coming together. The trilling sound
of “illimited”, another word coined
by Hardy, suggests the bird’s song and the alliterated “l” continues over the next
five lines – “illimited/frail/small/blast/beruffled/plume/fling/soul/gloom”
in an outpouring of song. The thrush is “aged” – like the century has aged - until
it seems to be barely hanging on to life; it is being battered by the wind. There is a poignant contrast between the force
of the wind in “blast” and the
softness and fragility of “beruffled
plume”. None of this, however, can
stop him singing his heart out.
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.
Hardy reflects
on why this bird should choose to sing (“carolings”
again suggests harmony between people, as they come together to sing) with such
joyous abandon in a landscape which gives no encouragement to it. The song ”trembles”,
a reference to the trilling sound, but also to the contrast between the inhospitability
of the bird’s surroundings and the fragility of his singing, as if the “darkling” forces might prevail. There is also something very simple, innocent
and child-like about the phrase “happy
good-night air” as well as another typical Hardy punning association –
between “good-night” as in “farewell”
and “good night” as in pleasant. The
only conclusion Hardy can come to is that the bird knows a reason for being
joyous in the face of all this despair – a Hope for the future – which is
hidden from Hardy.
Whether this
poem ends on a note of optimism or pessimism is moot. Is the thrush a “wise thrush”, as in Browning’s poem, knowing better than us, being
in tune with the world and his place in it, and hence, full of “rapture”? Or is he merely a bird that knows nothing of
the troubles that beset mankind and is merely a “waking dream” as Keats wonders about his Nightingale? Does Hardy go
away from the scene uplifted by the thrush’s song – or does he remain ignorant
of the reason for it? There may be a
clue in the use of “communion” and “carolling” in the evocation of communal
singing – perhaps Matthew Arnold’s answer, “be
true to one another”, has resonance for Hardy as well.
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