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Annotate these lines from "The Darkling Thrush": "Some blessed Hope, whereof he knew / And I was unaware."

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In the concluding lines of "The Darkling Thrush," the speaker contrasts his own bleak outlook with the thrush's joyful song, suggesting that the bird possesses a "blessed Hope" unknown to him. This hope is perceived as sacred and contrasts with the speaker's sense of alienation and inability to understand its source. These lines highlight Hardy's divergence from Victorian poets like Tennyson, foreshadowing the alienation and despair characteristic of the coming Modernist era.

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The speaker describes a blighted, "fervourless," wintry landscape, hard, bleak, and gray. The setting mirrors the broken, hopeless feeling in his own soul. This landscape seems to the speaker to represent the "Century's corpse," the littered, cold remains of the 1800s. (The poem was written in 1900.)

Then, amid all the death and harshness, the speaker hears the sweet song of a thrush. The bird is old, "frail, gaunt, and small," a fragile being, but his song is joyful.

The speaker says he can't imagine much reason for such happy singing amid the desolation everywhere. He ends the poem with the lines in question, saying the bird must have

Some blessed Hope, whereof he knew
And I was unaware.

In these lines, the speaker acknowledges that the thrush sings with a hope that seems blessed—to come from a sacred place. However, though he objectively acknowledges the bird's joyful hope, he himself cannot feel it. He is alienated from it. He can't understand where the hope comes from.

These lines are important, because they differentiate Hardy's sensibility from that of such very major Victorian poets as Arnold or Tennyson, who write of despair and hopelessness and wondering about where God might be, but who always come back in the end to an experience of faith and a comforting, optimistic hope in an ordered universe. Hardy, though this poem predates the Modernist period, is a harbinger of the sense of alienation and hopelessness that is to come as the twentieth century progresses.

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