Broken age thrush8/11/2023 ![]() Instead, Hardy presents the natural world as bleak and barren. Nevertheless, the poem does not represent this winter day in particularly flattering terms. Given that the poem is focused on mourning the death of a century, we can infer that the poet feels a sense of yearning for old times, and for rural places. The beginning of “The Darkling Thrush” announces that the poem is interested in rural spaces, and, by using the antiquated term “coppice,” also implicitly connects those spaces to the past. The term “coppice gate” situates the poem in the countryside, along a border between pastureland and woodland. In a sense, the century becomes like one long year which comes to an end in winter. In the first stanza, Hardy sets up an allegory between a cold day and the end of the century. ![]() The poem explicitly responds to the end of the nineteenth century, and expresses mourning at the loss of the past, and a pessimistic attitude towards the future. “The Darkling Thrush” was first published on December 29th, 1900, but the manuscript indicates that it was likely written in 1899. In this sense, it suggests that even the thrush may not differ from the world it inhabits as much as its song seems to indicate. Nevertheless, because “The Darkling Thrush” is the poem’s title, rather than its first line, it also functions as a label for the poem as a whole. In some sense, then, the title begins the arc of the poem by expressing a totally pessimistic perspective, one which is upended by the thrush’s hopeful song. ![]() Yet, by the end of the poem, it becomes clear that the thrush’s song stands totally in contrast to the gloominess of the day. In the title, the use of the word “Darkling” to describe the thrush rather than the evening suggests that the songbird cannot be distinguished from its environment. In the body of the poem, the phrases “coppice gate” and “corpse outleant” employ similarly antiquated, seemingly out-of-place vocabulary. The use of outmoded or even invented vocabulary is one of Hardy’s stylistic hallmarks-the characteristics which make his poetry sound unique. In the title of “The Darkling Thrush,” Hardy revives the word and uses it slightly differently, to describe a thrush who calls out in a night which is growing dark. The word “darkling” is an antiquated term that means growing dark or characterized by darkness. Although he sees room only for pessimism on earth, the little bird up in the night air must sense “Some blessed Hope” (31). Because he can see “so little cause” for singing, and yet the thrush sings, the speaker concludes that it must know something he doesn’t. The speaker looks around, both near himself and far out, and can see no justification anywhere for such joyful singing. Night is coming on, yet the frail thrush chooses to sing out with a full voice into the “growing gloom” (24). The thrush looks small and weak, and its feathers are ruffled by the cruel winter winds. He looks up to see an old thrush, a type of songbird. Suddenly, within the overhanging tangle of dead plants, he hears a voice sing out joyfully, without a tinge of awareness of the bleakness the speaker perceives in the world. The speaker continues in this bleak tone as he observes that the fertility of the land has given way to barrenness, and that every living thing seems to share his hopeless outlook. Within this metaphor, the grey skies become the century’s tomb, and the wind its mourning song. He sees the harsh features of the land as visual representations of the “Century’s corpse,” or the nineteenth century which was coming to an end as Hardy wrote this poem. In the second stanza, the speaker begins to think more metaphorically. ![]() The speaker looked up through a mesh of tangled plant stems, which he imagined as the broken strings of harps, and reflected that all the people who could be out in the desolate countryside had gone home to sit by the fire. It was dreary day towards the end of winter, and the setting sun was pale in the grey sky. The poem begins by introducing its speaker, who tells the story of a moment he experienced while leaning against a gate in the countryside.
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