The Darkling Thrush

Like Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Raven,” “The Darkling Thrush” is set on a dim winter evening. The poem’s first-person speaker, “I,” is in a meditative frame of mind; he leans on a gate—a classic pose for a Romantic thinker. This is a “coppice” (Line 1) gate, an adjectival form of “copse,” meaning a small, wooded area. The gate can be understood as a boundary line between human civilization and the chaotic wilderness beyond. The speaker is alone in this desolate scene, as everyone else has fled to the warm comforts of their fireplaces (Line 8). In Hardy’s death-obsessed poetic universe, even living people “haunt” (Line 7) their homes.

The first stanza is chock full of sensory words emphasizing the bitter hopelessness of the scene and the speaker’s fixation on cold and death (e.g., “spectre-grey” [Line 2], “broken” [Line 6], and “haunted” [Line 7]). Personifications of Frost and Winter in Lines 2 and 3 emphasize the harsh nature of the landscape. The sun is already setting, but these wintry forces make the fading of the sunlight feel even more “desolate” (Line 3). Hardy also personifies the sun by comparing it to a “weakening eye” (Line 4). He invites the reader to imagine the eye closing, a visual shorthand for the moment a person dies.

As the day expires, the speaker turns his thoughts to other dying things. In Lines 5 and 6, he fixates not on the lush vegetation of spring, but on “tangled bine-stems” (Line 5), the stripped, bare branches of late December. He compares these branches to broken lyre strings. The winter scene is rich in visuals, but notably lacking in another sensory aspect: sound. While the bine-stems score (Line 5) the sky, a verb with musical connotations, no sound can be heard. The metaphorical lyre is broken, and song—with its strong connections to joy and beauty—cannot exist here.

In the second stanza, the speaker moves deeper into linking the landscape to his grim worldview via metaphor. The jagged features of the landscape invite him to imagine it as the “corpse” (Line 10) of the 19th century. The speaker runs with the image: The cloudy sky above is the century’s “crypt” (Line 11), the wind is its funereal lament. As the speaker “leant” (Line 1) on the coppice gate in Line 1, he now describes the corpse of the century as “outleant” (Line 10) on the ground, mirroring the mourning speaker against the object of his mourning. “Leant” (Line 1) also evokes the leanness that winter food shortages inflict.

In this mental state, even objects in nature which should produce new growth in springtime—seeds—seem dead and desiccated to the speaker. He describes them as “shrunken hard and dry” (Line 14), a perhaps overly pessimistic understanding of a natural process. Many types of seeds form a hard and shriveled outer layer during the winter months. The bitter cold and frost are, in fact, crucial elements for activating many plants for springtime growth. (Hyacinths, for example, must be planted before the ground freezes in mid to late fall.) Hardy may here suggest that the speaker’s negative understanding of the world to be overly simplistic and short-sighted. While seeds do seem dead in winter, there is always hope for new growth in the new year.

As if to punctuate this faint suggestion of hope, Hardy introduces a new character in the third stanza. In a starkly silent landscape—as implied by the broken lyre strings of Stanza 1—a voice rises in the gloom. It belongs to a thrush, a common British songbird. However, if the thrush is a symbol of hope, it is a somewhat pathetic one. This bird seems to be on its last legs. It is old and scruffy, “blast-beruffled” (Line 22) by wind and age. As the day (and the year) near their ends, so the bird seems to near the conclusion of its life.

Nevertheless, Hardy is careful to emphasize that the bird makes a choice (Line 23) to “fling its soul / Upon the growing gloom” (Lines 23-24). The bird may here be a stand-in for Hardy himself, who began publishing his poetry relatively late in life (he published “The Darkling Thrush” in his sixties). Despite the dismal nature of its conditions, the thrush—and Hardy himself—chooses to produce lovely works, even in the stark landscape of the late 19th century.

The thrush, like the ugly seeds of Stanza 2, may be a symbol of hope, but Hardy’s speaker quickly questions if that hope is warranted; perhaps the winter will never end. In the fourth and final stanza, the speaker is surprised that the bird has found any positive subject for its Christmas “carolings” (Line 25)—but the introduction of words like “blessed” (Line 31) and “Hope” (Line 31) may suggest that the bird has some divine knowledge or mandate that the speaker lacks. In the poem’s final lines, the speaker admits that there may well be a good cause for the thrush’s singing, even if the speaker does not know it yet. This leaves open the possibility that the speaker might learn to feel joy again in the future, however uncertain that future may be.