The Darkling Thrush

I leant upon a coppice gate,
When Frost was spectre-gray,
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 me
The Century's corpse outleant,
Its crypt the cloudy canopy,
The wind its death-lament.
The ancient pulse of germ and birth
Was shrunken hard and dry,
And every spirit upon earth
Seemed fervorless 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,
With 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.

Thomas Hardy

Hardy’s sweet poem of hope and the numinous seems appropriate as we clamber out of ‘Winter’s dregs’ ourselves. The speaker, leaning on a gate in a chilly twilight, hears a thrush singing so joyfully that he feels it speaks of something larger – and more beautiful – than the current lonely landscape in which he finds himself. He does not anthropomorphise the bird, but does endow it with knowledge of this ‘blessed Hope’; in this sense the poet, standing at the fence at the turn of the century, looks back across the past hundred years to Romanticism; but hope, of course, deals with the future. Hardy’s speaker, given the choice, chooses to look forward.