Hardy's The Darkling Thrush
No Gloomy Bird
Thomas Hardy’s “The Darkling Thrush” consists of four rimed stanzas. Each stanza follows the same rime-scheme, ABABCDCD.
First Stanza: “I leant upon a coppice gate”
The speaker sets a dreary stage by remarking, “I leant upon a coppice gate / When Frost was spectre-gray.” He continues to paint a gloomy scene of his surroundings; winter has made “dregs” of the bushes and grasses and furthermore made them “desolate.” The sun is setting, and he refers to the sunset as “the weakening eye of day.”
As he looks up into the sky, he sees a tangle of a climbing vine that reminds him of the strings of a “broken lyre.” The music has gone out of the world along with the light and beauty. The season of winter becomes his symbol of inner desolation that he feels for himself and his fellows.
He claims that all the other people who might be around have “sought their household fires.” He refers to these people as ghosts who might have “haunted nigh.” Every detail that this speaker puts forth adds to the gloomy, dreary melancholy that he is experiencing.
Second Stanza: “The land's sharp features seemed to be“
The speaker then broadens his scope and remarks that the landscape seems to represent “[t]he Century’s corpse.” The poem was written around 1900, so the speaker seems to be collating his thoughts about the end of a century and the beginning of a new one. The “corpse” of the last century is not looking and sounding good with the winter atmosphere of “cloudy canopy” and “the wind” functioning as a “death lament.”
The speaker is so deep in melancholy that he cannot imagine one speck of brightness in the earth as he laments, “The ancient pulse of germ and birth / Was shrunken hard and dry.” And then he grieves that “every spirit upon earth / Seemed a fervourless as I.” Because he has no zeal, he imagines that there is no one who is any better suited then he is.
Third Stanza: “At once a voice arose among”
Suddenly, the speaker hears a bird singing “among / The bleak twigs overheard.” The bird’s song is “a full-hearted evensong / Of joy illimited.” His description of the bird’s melody contrasts mightily with the all the “gloom” he has heretofore painted. The bird itself was “An aged thrush, frail, gaunt, and small, / In blast-beruffled plume.” But his song filled the sad darkness; the speaker says that the bird “had chosen . . . to fling his soul / Upon the growing gloom.”
The birdsong was so impressive that the speaker avers that the song came from the bird’s very soul. The speaker is so electrified with the joy of the song that the reader then wonders if the birdsong affected this speaker as the crow did the speaker of Robert Frost’s “Dust of Snow.”
Fourth Stanza: “So little cause for carolings”
But then the speaker announces that there seemed little in the environment to herald “carolings / Of such ecstatic sound.” Everything around him still looked quite gloomy; a winter night was still coming on.
But because of the wonderful birdsong, he could not quite shake the notion that even though he was unable to perceive it, he suspected, “there trembled through / His happy good-night air / Some blessed Hope, whereof he knew / And I was unaware.”
Unlike Frost’s speaker, for whom the crow’s dust of snow saved from his bad mood, this speaker will, no doubt, remain ignorant of the joy that filled this thrush, and therefore, will retain his gloom and melancholy.
Thomas Hardy
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Thomas Hardy
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