Thomas Hardy: The Darkling Thrush

Between Thomas Hardy’s poems and Edward Thomas’s, I remembered just how difficult it is to decipher a poet’s work. If I were only to strive to understand the concrete meaning, then poetry would just be shallow and short writing.  My first impressions of Thomas Hardy are that he is a dark poet writing from sadness, maybe even depression. While Hardy is the focus of my current list of poems, I decided to focus on just one of his poems going for a quality analysis rather than quantity.

I chose to focus on The Darkling Thrush, simply because I liked the title. On the Concrete level, Hardy describes a sort of winter setting where everyone is inside because it is cold in the first stanza. Next, the Century’s is personified as having a corpse which is the land, and the wind being a lamenting. A sort of gloominess is intended toward the reader with the line, “And every spirit upon the earth Seemed fervourless as I.”  Suddenly in Stanza three amidst a gloomy scene, and old skinny bird, a thrush, begins to sing. Explained in the final stanza is that there is nothing around that the bird could be singing for as it is cold, dead, and dreary. So it is that the narrator supposes the bird sings of good capitalized Hope, that he is unaware of.

Surely, there must be more to this poem than a man in a dreary winter scene who hears suddenly hears a cheerful bird. As determining this is very difficult, I reviewed some symbols of literature. As winter time is a common symbol for death, one could interpret this poem as someone passing away. That person may have lived as long as a century, and while everyone else is warm by their fires, (alive) the narrator is dying. What hope is there in death, especially for an atheist, but Hope is introduced by the thrush?  Could it be that the thrush  sings of an afterlife while on the concrete level it is probably looking forward to spring, which is a common symbol of rebirth. While this poem was written on December 31, 1900 it seems likely that Hardy could have been talking about the Century. maybe the 1800s weren’t so great, so the thrush is a symbol of hope for a better world in the next century.