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The Darkling Thrush | Introduction

Thomas Hardy’s gloomy poem about the turn of the twentieth century, “The Darkling Thrush,” remains one of his most popular and anthologized lyrics. Written on the eve of the new century and first published in Graphic with the subtitle “By the Century’s Deathbed” and then published in London Times on New Year’s Day, 1901, the thirty-twoline poem uses a bleak and wintry landscape as a metaphor for the close of the nineteenth century and the joyful song of a solitary thrush as a symbolic image of the dawning century. Like much of Hardy’s writing, “The Darkling Thrush” embodies the writer’s despair and pessimism. This is partially offset, however, by the artfulness of the poem itself. Hardy was sixty years old when he penned the lyric, far past the life expectancy for a man of his time. A few years earlier he had stopped writing novels, after critics panned Jude the Obscure, and turned to writing poetry exclusively. “The Darkling Thrush” is included in his second volume of verse, Poems of the Past and the Present (1901), in the section “Miscellaneous Poems,” sandwiched between “The Last Chrysanthemum” and “The Comet at Yell’ham,” two other bleak poems of nature. Harper & Brothers published Poems of the Past and the Present in an edition of one thousand copies, and a few months later a second edition was published in an edition of five hundred copies. The poem also frequently appears in poetry anthologies such as The Norton Anthology of Poetry because it is a transitional poem, illustrating the trepidation and doubt many people felt about the future as the Victorian era came to an end and the modern era was about to begin.

The Darkling Thrush Summary

Stanza 1
The opening lines of “The Darkling Thrush” establish the tone and the setting of the poem. Hardy underscores the speaker’s meditative mood by describing him leaning upon a “coppice gate,” meaning a gate that opens onto the woods. The presence of frost tells readers it is winter, and the adjective “spectre-grey,” a word Hardy coined, suggests a haunted landscape. The word “dregs” means the last of something, but here the dregs act upon the “weakening eye of day,” making the twilight “desolate.”

In the fifth and sixth lines, the speaker uses a simile to compare “tangled bine-stems” to “strings of broken lyres.” Bine-stems are the stems of shrubs, and a lyre is a stringed musical instrument similar to a harp. Although “score” is a musical term, Hardy uses it to create an ominous visual image. While the speaker is outside contemplating a bleak landscape, the rest of the world is comfortably inside, warmed by “their household fires.”

Stanza 2
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