The Darkling Thrush

Thomas Hardy was one of the great writers and poets of English language, who lived from the first half of the nineteenth to the early twentieth century; he was born in 1840 and died in 1928… what changes he saw in his lifetime! He is famous for his novels set in the west country, in his imagined county of Wessex, novels such as Under the Greenwood Tree, Far from the Madding Crowd, The Return of the Native, The Mayor of Casterbridge, Tess of the d’Urbervilles and Jude the Obscure.

I’ve read most of his novels and they are much loved by many people, and although I can see the merit in them, and can see that Hardy was a tremendous writer, with wonderful eye for detail and memorable imagery…. I just find them so depressing. Thwarted love, death, murder, betrayal, wrongs going un-righted… every time I read one of his novels, much as I admire it, I promise myself I’ll never read another.

he wrote nearly sixty short stories as well as his eighteen long novels, and many many poems. This one is particularly sweet; he probably wrote it in 1899, and it was published in 1900.

The Darkling Thrush

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.

by Thomas Hardy