Wednesday, 5 October 2016

Victorian Verse - The Darkling Thrush - Thomas Hardy


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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