The Full Text of “The Darkling Thrush”
1I leant upon a coppice gate
2 When Frost was spectre-grey,
3And Winter's dregs made desolate
4 The weakening eye of day.
5The tangled bine-stems scored the sky
6 Like strings of broken lyres,
7And all mankind that haunted nigh
8 Had sought their household fires.
9The land's sharp features seemed to be
10 The Century's corpse outleant,
11His crypt the cloudy canopy,
12 The wind his death-lament.
13The ancient pulse of germ and birth
14 Was shrunken hard and dry,
15And every spirit upon earth
16 Seemed fervourless as I.
17At once a voice arose among
18 The bleak twigs overhead
19In a full-hearted evensong
20 Of joy illimited;
21An aged thrush, frail, gaunt, and small,
22 In blast-beruffled plume,
23Had chosen thus to fling his soul
24 Upon the growing gloom.
25So little cause for carolings
26 Of such ecstatic sound
27Was written on terrestrial things
28 Afar or nigh around,
29That I could think there trembled through
30 His happy good-night air
31Some blessed Hope, whereof he knew
32 And I was unaware.
The Full Text of “The Darkling Thrush”
1I leant upon a coppice gate
2 When Frost was spectre-grey,
3And Winter's dregs made desolate
4 The weakening eye of day.
5The tangled bine-stems scored the sky
6 Like strings of broken lyres,
7And all mankind that haunted nigh
8 Had sought their household fires.
9The land's sharp features seemed to be
10 The Century's corpse outleant,
11His crypt the cloudy canopy,
12 The wind his death-lament.
13The ancient pulse of germ and birth
14 Was shrunken hard and dry,
15And every spirit upon earth
16 Seemed fervourless as I.
17At once a voice arose among
18 The bleak twigs overhead
19In a full-hearted evensong
20 Of joy illimited;
21An aged thrush, frail, gaunt, and small,
22 In blast-beruffled plume,
23Had chosen thus to fling his soul
24 Upon the growing gloom.
25So little cause for carolings
26 Of such ecstatic sound
27Was written on terrestrial things
28 Afar or nigh around,
29That I could think there trembled through
30 His happy good-night air
31Some blessed Hope, whereof he knew
32 And I was unaware.
-
“The Darkling Thrush” Introduction
-
“The Darkling Thrush” is a poem by the English poet and novelist Thomas Hardy. The poem describes a desolate world, which the poem’s speaker takes as cause for despair and hopelessness. However, a bird (the “thrush”) bursts onto the scene, singing a beautiful and hopeful song—so hopeful that the speaker wonders whether the bird knows something that the speaker doesn’t. Written in December 1900, the poem reflects on the end of the 19th century and the state of Western civilization. The desolation of the scene the speaker sees serves as an extended metaphor for the decay of Western civilization, while the thrush is a symbol for its possible rebirth through religious faith.
-
-
“The Darkling Thrush” Summary
-
I was leaning on a gate, on a path leading into a forest. The frost was gray as a ghost and the last of the winter day made the sun look bleak as it descended. The tangled stems of climbing plants cut across the sky like the strings of a broken musical instrument. And all the people that lived nearby had gone away to the warmth of their homes.
The land’s harsh hills and cliffs seemed like the corpse of the just-ended century, leaning out. And the clouds hanging above seemed like the century's tomb, while the wind seemed like a sad song played upon its death. The age-old urge to reproduce and grow had shriveled up. And every living thing on earth seemed as depressed as me.
All of a sudden, a voice rose up from the dreary twigs overhead, singing an evening prayer with limitless joy. He was a bird, frail and old, skinny and small, with his feathers rumpled by the wind. He had decided to sing with all his soul in the increasing dark.
There was no cause for such joyful singing—at least no cause was evident in the world around me. So I thought the bird's happy song carried some secret and holy hope, something that he knew about but I didn’t.
-
-
“The Darkling Thrush” Themes
-
Nature and the Decline of Human Civilization
"The Darkling Thrush” appears to be a poem about a winter landscape, which the speaker describes in considerable detail. On a symbolic level, however, this landscape is an extended metaphor: its bleakness and decay reflect the state of Western culture at the end of the 19th century. The speaker describes Western culture in a state of desolation: it seems to be damaged and dead, without the possibility of rebirth or resurrection. In this sense, the poem is both an elegy for and a rejection of that culture, providing a subtle critique of the way that the West has failed to take care of its own natural and cultural resources.
In the first stanza, the speaker compares “tangled-bine stems”—the stems of a climbing plant—to the “strings of broken lyres.” The “lyre” is a significant symbol: it represents poetry and, more broadly, the cultural accomplishment of Western civilization. Its broken strings suggest that Western culture itself has fallen into disrepair or, like the “bine-stems,” has not been properly maintained and pruned. In other words, the speaker thinks that things have grown unruly and gotten out of hand.
The second stanza expands on this idea, with a series of metaphors that describe the landscape as embodying the death of the 19th century and its culture. The speaker compares the landscape’s “sharp features” to “the Century’s corpse.” Since the poem was written late in 1900, most scholars take this as a reference to the end of the 19th century. The century is dead because it’s literally over, but it’s also dead in a broader sense: the simile in the previous stanza with the “broken lyres” suggests that the speaker feels that its culture has in some way failed.
The speaker does not specify the reasons why Western culture has failed—though there are clues in the way the speaker describes the landscape. For instance, the speaker begins the poem leaning on a “coppice gate.” A “coppice” is a managed forest, which foresters cut back regularly to stimulate growth. But with the “bine-stems” growing up into the sky, it seems that this coppice has not been recently cut back. This image suggests that human beings have shirked their duty to care for the land they use. Since the landscape is a metaphor for the state of Western culture, the implication is thus that people have acted as poor caretakers for Western culture itself.
These images of the landscape are perhaps also references to industrialization, the process by which the economy shifted from farming to factories. This process did significant damage to the English landscape, and it also caused the depopulation of rural parts of England. As factories took over the work—such as weaving and lace-making—that had been traditionally done by rural populations, people left their farms to work in the cities' factories.
The speaker does not propose any remedies to address the situation. Indeed, the speaker does not seem to believe any improvement is possible. In the final lines of the second stanza, the speaker complains that the cycle of death and rebirth has ended: it is “shrunken hard and dry.” Judging from the first half of the poem, it seems that the cultural death the speaker describes will not end or reverse; it is permanent, and the speaker doesn’t know what will come next.
- See where this theme is active in the poem.
-
Hope and Renewal
The first half of “The Darkling Thrush” describes a desolate winter landscape—an extended metaphor for the decay of Western culture, which the speaker presents as dead or unsalvageable. Just as the poem seems to be sliding into despair, however, a symbol of hope and renewal bursts onto the scene: a singing “thrush.” Various details suggest that the speaker treats the thrush as a symbol for religious faith and devotion. The speaker thus presents renewed religious faith as a solution to the cultural crisis he or she describes in the first half of the poem.
The speaker describes the bird that appears in the second half of the poem in considerable detail, down its feathers. It is possible, then, to read the “Hope” that the bird expresses and represents literally: the speaker’s bad mood is lifted, partially, by the bird and its song. But the speaker also provides hints that the bird’s song should be understood metaphorically—both on its own and in conjunction with the extended metaphor developed in the poem’s first two stanzas.
One key detail is that the speaker describes the bird’s song as “a full-hearted evensong.” Evensong is a ritual in the Anglican Church: it is evening prayers, chants, and songs. The speaker thus describes the bird’s song as embodying a religious ritual. And in the next stanza, the speaker calls the “Hope” in the thrush’s song “blessed.” The word “blessed” once again suggests religious rituals and beliefs. And “Hope” itself may be symbolic here: it’s not just any hope, but the Christian hope for resurrection—that is, life after death. As such, the “hope” that the thrush provides might be tied to Christianity.
The thrush’s appearance in the poem suggests a solution to the cultural decay that the speaker documents in the first half of the poem. In the first half of the poem, the speaker treats the bleak landscape as an extended metaphor for the cultural decline of Western civilization—a decline so severe that the speaker sees no possibility that it might be renewed or reborn. But the hope the thrush embodies does offer the possibility of renewal and resurrection, specifically through religious faith.
That said, the speaker is "unaware" of this "blessed Hope." Perhaps this means that the bird is singing in vain, and the Christian tradition it evokes is as doomed as the rest of civilization. This would suggest that this tradition is itself rather oblivious, blind to the reality of the world around it. Alternatively, the presence of the happy bird in the midst of such drudgery suggests the opposite: that religious faith is the one thing that will survive the march of time. It's up to the reader to decide.
- See where this theme is active in the poem.
-
Despair and Isolation
“The Darkling Thrush” in part uses its description of a bleak winter landscape as an extended metaphor for the cultural decline of Western civilization. But it is also a literal, detailed description of the world—and of the speaker’s state of mind while looking out onto that landscape. The speaker seems filled with a sense of isolation and despair, and these feelings strongly shape how the speaker interprets the surrounding world. Intentionally or not, the poem suggests the cyclical and self-fulfilling nature of negativity.
The speaker describes him- or herself as “fervourless” (meaning depressed or lacking passion), and then sees this trait reflected everywhere. Not only does “every spirit” seem as “fervourless” as the speaker, the speaker consistently interprets the natural world in terms that reinforce his or her own state of mind. For example, the speaker describes the “Frost” as “spectre-grey,” meaning it looks like a ghost or a spirit. The speaker interprets the frost as a sign that the world is dead, lifeless, and hopeless. However, one could imagine a different speaker interpreting the landscape differently; for instance, there is no objective basis for seeing the “land’s sharp features” as an image of the “Century’s corpse.” They could just as soon be majestic and soaring or evidence of God’s hand in creation.
While the poem’s landscape is described in detail, it is not described objectively: instead, each element becomes another testament to the speaker’s personal emotions and priorities. The poem’s second stanza, for example, consists of a long list of metaphors, one building on the next: the landscape is like the “Century’s corpse,” the clouds are like a “crypt,” the wind like a “death-lament.” The speaker is thus trapped in a vicious cycle: his or her emotions shape the landscape, which then reinforces his or her emotions.
This cycle holds until the thrush appears in the poem, in stanza 3. The thrush refuses to assimilate to the speaker’s view of the world or to reinforce the speaker’s emotions. Though the bird is skinny and bedraggled—potentially as much a symbol of despair as the clouds overhead or the wind whistling—it nonetheless sings a hopeful song. The speaker thus concludes that the thrush knows something the speaker doesn’t: “Some blessed Hope, whereof he knew / And I was unaware.”
In its brilliant, inexplicable hopefulness, the thrush forces the speaker to recognize the existence of emotions beyond despair and isolation. Furthermore, the thrush makes the speaker recognize elements of the outside world that cannot be interpreted through those emotions. It might break the vicious cycle in which the speaker has been trapped, and so proves to the reader, too, that hope is present in even the most desolate of circumstances.
- See where this theme is active in the poem.
-
-
Line-by-Line Explanation & Analysis of “The Darkling Thrush”
-
Lines 1-4
I leant upon a coppice gate
When Frost was spectre-grey,
And Winter's dregs made desolate
The weakening eye of day.The first four lines of “The Darkling Thrush” establish the poem’s form and its initial themes.
The poem begins with the speaker leaning against a “coppice gate” at the “dregs” (that is, the end) of a winter’s day. (A “coppice” is a kind of forest that foresters regularly cut back, chopping down trees and bushes in order to stimulate its growth. This detail will be important later in the stanza). For the speaker, the landscape is desolate; it provokes despair. For instance, the speaker uses a metaphor to compare the “Frost” which has fallen on it to a “spectre”—a ghost or spirit. Though the “Frost” could easily be interpreted differently by someone with a different mindset—for instance, as a sign of Christmas cheer—the speaker takes it as a metaphor for death. Similarly, the sun (the “eye of day” in line 4) is “weakening”—but the speaker does not mention that it will rise again. The prevailing mood is thus one of decline and decay, without the possibility of renewal or resurrection.
These lines also introduce a formal pattern that will hold for the rest of the poem. They are written in alternating lines of iambic tetrameter and iambic trimeter, rhymed ABAB. It also has a regular pattern of enjambment: every other line is end-stopped. This pattern will hold through the poem’s first two stanzas; until the end of the second stanza, the speaker will never go more than 2 lines without an end-stop.
“The Darkling Thrush” is thus a ballad. The ballad is one of the oldest forms in English poetry. Though the ballad originated in France, it is strongly associated with the English language—and, in particular, English folk traditions. The ballad was long used for folk songs, which were popular poems about crime and love (usually printed cheaply and posted inside taverns). It was also used for hymns—the religious songs sung in English churches. The form is thus highly flexible, capable of accommodating a wide range of content. Hardy likely turns to it here for its religious seriousness: these first four lines suggest that this will not be a light-hearted poem with a conversational tone. Instead, it will pose the most serious questions affecting the speaker and his or her society—and it will attempt to offer answers.
-
Lines 5-8
The tangled bine-stems scored the sky
Like strings of broken lyres,
And all mankind that haunted nigh
Had sought their household fires. -
Lines 9-12
The land's sharp features seemed to be
The Century's corpse outleant,
His crypt the cloudy canopy,
The wind his death-lament. -
Lines 13-16
The ancient pulse of germ and birth
Was shrunken hard and dry,
And every spirit upon earth
Seemed fervourless as I. -
Lines 17-20
At once a voice arose among
The bleak twigs overhead
In a full-hearted evensong
Of joy illimited; -
Lines 21-24
An aged thrush, frail, gaunt, and small,
In blast-beruffled plume,
Had chosen thus to fling his soul
Upon the growing gloom. -
Lines 25-28
So little cause for carolings
Of such ecstatic sound
Was written on terrestrial things
Afar or nigh around, -
Lines 29-32
That I could think there trembled through
His happy good-night air
Some blessed Hope, whereof he knew
And I was unaware.
-
-
“The Darkling Thrush” Symbols
-
Frost
Frost is a kind of ice that forms in cold weather. It tends to fall on the ground or on low-lying plants and shrubs, often killing or damaging the plants that it touches.
When the speaker mentions the “spectre-grey” frost that marks the winter landscape, he or she is likely referring to the literal weather conditions. But frost is also symbolically rich: because it damages plants and prevents them from growing, it symbolizes death itself. And because spring symbolizes renewal, rebirth, and resurrection, the frost stands in symbolically for the forces that block such rebirth. In this poem, the frost likely symbolizes not just death, but death in the absence of Christian resurrection—death as a permanent, irreversible loss. It is the symbolic opposite of the “germ and birth” that the speaker describes in line 13.
- See where this symbol appears in the poem.
-
Eye of Day
“Eye of day” is a metaphor for the sun. Because it is round and bright, the sun is often compared to an eye in poetry, a comparison that personifies the sun, giving it human characteristics.
Underlying this metaphor, however, is a broader symbolic significance. The sun commonly understood as a rich symbol in English poetry. Because the word “sun” sounds a lot like the word “son,” poets often use the sun as a symbol for Jesus Christ himself, the son of God. Moreover, like Christ, the sun appears to vanish and then rises again. The speaker does not make an obvious, heavy-handed reference to this tradition, but it is nonetheless present. The speaker thus quietly suggests that Christ himself, with his promise of renewal and resurrection, is disappearing from this desolate scene, leaving behind a bleak and unredeemed world.
- See where this symbol appears in the poem.
-
Lyre
A lyre is a stringed instrument: a small harp, played with one hand. Traditionally, the lyre was the instrument played by Greek poets like Homer and Sappho to accompany their poems.
Because of its close associations with poetry—and because it is now rarely played—the lyre in a poem is almost always a symbol for poetry itself, rather than a literal instrument. More broadly, it symbolizes the cultural achievement of Western civilization: its great poetry, music, and philosophy. For the strings of the lyre to be “broken” (as noted in line 6) thus suggests that poetry itself—and Western civilization more broadly—have fallen into decline. The speaker sees evidence of this decline in the poorly managed landscape he or she surveys (the "tangled bine-stems") and imagines that it extends to all corners of Western civilization.
- See where this symbol appears in the poem.
-
Fires
The “fires” at the end of line 8 play a complicated symbolic role in the poem. On the one hand, they represent warmth and security in a cold and desolate landscape: with the exception of the speaker, all the human figures in the poem have gone home to the solace and security that their fires provide on a cold day. In this sense, the fires are a positive symbol of human resilience in the face of a hostile natural world.
On the other hand, however, fire is often a symbol of destruction. It calls to mind burning libraries and ruined cities: the destruction of civilization and its artifacts. This second symbolic sense is only implicitly present in the line, but it is strengthened by the rhyme between “household fires” and “broken lyres.” The rhyme encourages the reader to seek a connection between the “broken lyres” and the “household fires,” and the connection lies in fire’s hostility to human culture. As a symbol, then, fire is double-edged, representing both security and destruction. It thus demonstrates for the reader how narrow the difference between the two can be and suggests that perhaps the people who are cozily nestled by their fires at home are actually participating in a form of destruction by refusing to face how bad the world has gotten.
- See where this symbol appears in the poem.
-
Germ and Birth
In line 13, the speaker describes the renewal of two different kinds of life: animal and plant. Animals are born, while plants germinate, sending up saplings and shoots. Taken together, “germ and birth” thus symbolize the renewal of life and its rebirth. (And this renewal is linked to a specific season, spring, when plants “germ” and animals are often born.)
More broadly, this idea of renewal and rebirth can be taken as a Christian symbol. Often in poetry, the return of spring is used as a symbol for resurrection: the rebirth of the faithful, after death, in heaven. For the speaker, however, this possibility of rebirth has disappeared: its “ancient pulse” is “hard and dry.” The symbol is cancelled even as it’s brought into the poem; there may have once been the possibility of renewal and rebirth, but that possibility has been buried by the cold and desolate landscape the speaker surveys.
- See where this symbol appears in the poem.
-
Hope
Literally speaking, “hope” is an expectation—with or without justification—that something good is going to happen. The speaker may use the word here in that simple, neutral sense: the world of the poem is so bleak that any hope, even a relatively generic hope, is exciting and revelatory.
But the word might also symbolize a specific kind of hope: the Christian hope of resurrection and life after death. Indeed, 19th-century Christians often referred to their expectation of going to heaven as their “hope.” That the speaker capitalizes the bird's "Hope" and refers to it as “blessed” further strengthens the sense that this is a specifically religious hope. In this sense, the word is not simply literal, but also symbolic: it symbolizes Christian faith and embodies its boldest expectations.
- See where this symbol appears in the poem.
-
Thrush
When the "thrush" (a type of bird) first appears in the poem in stanza 3, the speaker dedicates a considerable amount of attention to its literal, physical details: he or she describes its weight, its size, even its feathers. However, as the poem progresses, it becomes clear that the thrush also carries significant symbolic weight in the poem: the thrush is a symbol of hope. The speaker tells the reader as much in line 31, where he or she interprets the thrush's beautiful, cheerful song—hearing in it the knowledge of "Some blessed Hope" that stands apart from the bleak world the poem otherwise describes.
The hope that the thrush symbolizes also seems to be at least implicitly religious. The speaker consistently interprets the thrush's song in religious terms, describing it as "evensong"—the evening prayers in the Anglican church—and as "blessed." The hope that the thrush symbolizes is might, then, be the hope of Christian resurrection and renewal.
- See where this symbol appears in the poem.
-
-
“The Darkling Thrush” Poetic Devices & Figurative Language
-
Enjambment
“The Darkling Thrush” uses enjambment in a distinctive and significant pattern. In the first two stanzas, the poem generally alternates enjambed and end-stopped lines. For example, line 5 is enjambed, while line 6 is end-stopped. These units of enjambment and end-stop correspond with the poem’s metrical units: each pair of iambic tetrameter and iambic trimeter lines forms its own grammatical unit that concludes with an end-stop. This pattern repeats in lines 7-8 and holds throughout the first half of the poem, except lines 10-12, where each line is end-stopped. In the first half of the poem, the end-stops are never farther than two lines apart. This creates a highly regular, even constricted reading experience: the poem feels so well-organized as to be oppressive.
However, this rigid reading experience transforms in the second half of the poem. The third stanza has only two end-stops: one line 20 and one in line 24. (Lines 21 and 22 might look like end-stops because they end with punctuation—and elsewhere in the poem enjambed lines are unpunctuated. However, the description of the “aged thrush” is grammatically incomplete until the end of line 24, so these lines are technically enjambed.) The same is true of stanza 4: there are end-stops only in lines 28 and 32 (and the end-stop in line 28 is very weak: many readers will experience it as an enjambment). The number of end-stops has been cut in half: now they appear every four lines instead of every two.
After the tight organization of the poem’s opening two stanzas, this change feels almost liberating—it's a radical expansion of possibility. When the thrush enters the poem, he reshapes the reader’s experience of the poem, transforming a constrained, organized world into an open, fluid space. The use of enjambment thus underlines the poem’s argument: the thrush is a sign of hope for both reader and poet, and believing in this hope can be freeing.
- See where this poetic device appears in the poem.
-
End-Stopped Line
- See where this poetic device appears in the poem.
-
Caesura
- See where this poetic device appears in the poem.
-
Alliteration
- See where this poetic device appears in the poem.
-
Assonance
- See where this poetic device appears in the poem.
-
Consonance
- See where this poetic device appears in the poem.
-
Personification
- See where this poetic device appears in the poem.
-
Simile
- See where this poetic device appears in the poem.
-
Metaphor
- See where this poetic device appears in the poem.
-
Extended Metaphor
- See where this poetic device appears in the poem.
-
-
"The Darkling Thrush" Vocabulary
Select any word below to get its definition in the context of the poem. The words are listed in the order in which they appear in the poem.
- Coppice
- Spectre-grey
- Dregs
- Bine-stems
- Scored
- Lyre
- Haunted
- Nigh
- Outleant
- Crypt
- Death-lament
- Pulse
- Germ
- Fervourless
- Evensong
- Illimited
- Gaunt
- Blast-beruffled
- Plume
- Fling
- Carolings
- Terrestrial
- Air
- Whereof
-
A wooded area. In a coppice, foresters cut back the trees and shrubs that form the forest to stimulate growth. A coppice is thus a natural area that is managed by human beings, for human purposes.
- See where this vocabulary word appears in the poem.
-
Form, Meter, & Rhyme Scheme of “The Darkling Thrush”
-
Form
“The Darkling Thrush” is a ballad. In keeping with the conventions of that form, it is written in eight-line stanzas, also called octaves. Each octave features alternating lines of iambic tetrameter and iambic trimeter, rhymed ABABCDCD.
The ballad is a serial form, which means there are no limits to the number of stanzas it might have. (Often, ballads were sung, printed, and reprinted, with new stanzas added and old ones taken out; the poems would grow as their readers’ priorities changed). “The Darkling Thrush” is similarly serial in that the poem may be divided into two parts. In the first, the speaker meditates on the bleakness and despair of the landscape around him or her. In the second, the appearance of the thrush provides a rush of hope. The break between stanza 2 and stanza 3 thus operates as a kind of volta or turn. But the form does not change as the poem’s subject matter changes—unlike the sonnet, for example, whose form does change after its volta. The ballad continues to hum along, its form smooth and unperturbed, even as the content that fills it shifts. (Though it is worth noting that the poem's pattern of enjambment shifts significantly in its second half).
The ballad is an old form in English poetry: it predates many of the language’s prestigious literary forms, like the sonnet. But unlike the sonnet, the ballad has remained a popular form throughout its long history. It was used for a wide range of popular songs and poems—everything from hymns sung in English churches to poems about murderers and outlaws, pasted on the walls of taverns. The form thus has no particular content associated with it: it’s just as good for religious poems that take on the most serious and difficult question as it is for poems about the seedy underworld of English crime.
“The Darkling Thrush,” seems to follow the more serious, weighty part of the ballad tradition. Certainly there are no tales of murder and romance here. But ultimately what attracted Hardy to the ballad was probably its strong associations with England itself. Though it originated in France, it became over the centuries a form deeply associated with English popular culture and the everyday language of English peasants. For Hardy, the form gave him an intimacy with the English language and its deep history, which is especially useful for a poem critiquing contemporary English culture.
-
Meter
“The Darkling Thrush” is written in ballad meter. It alternates between lines of iambic tetrameter (four poetic feet with a da DUM rhythm, for a total of 8 syllables per line) and iambic trimeter (three poetic feet with a da DUM rhythm, for a total of 6 syllables per line). This rhythm is clear from the poem’s opening lines:
I leant | upon | a cop- | ice gate
When Frost | was spect- | re-greyThis is a traditional meter with roots in folk songs. It was used for poetry and music on a wide range of topics, from religious hymns to poems about murder and crime. Hardy likely turned to ballad meter because it is a strongly English tradition. He may have hoped it would allow him to access something deep and authentic in the language. And indeed, he uses the meter in a particularly forceful fashion, even (or especially) as he critiques the culture of England itself.
The meter is often smooth and skillful—note, for instance, the rhyming feminine endings of line 6 and line 8, “broken lyres” and “household fires.” It’s a difficult move, but the poem pulls it off effortlessly:
Like strings | of brok- | -en ly- | res
Had sought | their house- | hold fi- | resThough this is a metrical substitution, it hardly feels like one, because the speaker repeats it and because the stressed and stressed syllables rhyme across the two lines. However, the poem also uses some less smooth substitutions, like spondees, which often introduce extra stresses into the line. Compare lines 9, 19, and 30:
Line 9:
The land’s | sharp fea- | tures seemed | to be
Line 19:
In a | full-heart- | ed e- | vensong |
Line 30:
His hap- | py good- | night air
The stresses tend to pile up in these lines—as in line 30, which closes with three consecutive stresses. This gives the feeling of rhythmic density and intensity; the lines feel thick and heavy.
This sense of density is often related to its content. For instance, the spondee in line 5 corresponds nicely with the density of the “bine-stems” that partially obscure the sky: their thickness and violence are echoed by the line’s weight. (Something similar could be said about the “sharp features” in line 9: the line is as sharp as the features it describes). Later in the poem, when the thrush appears, the spondees mark the intensity and fullness of the speaker’s joy. It seems so rich and important that it overflows the boundaries of metrical propriety. In these moments of intensity, the poem does seem to approach something essential to the English language: it seems to revive the heavy stresses and sonic density of Anglo-Saxon poems like Beowulf, bringing their sonic character into contemporary English.
-
Rhyme Scheme
“The Darkling Thrush” follows the typical rhyme scheme of a ballad:
ABABCDCD
Each stanza introduces a new group of rhymes following that same scheme. The rhymes tend to be simple, direct words: even when it rhymes with words of two or more syllables, the poem favors simple diction. Despite this simplicity, the poem often uses rhyme in pointed and significant ways. In some cases, rhyme emphasizes the intimacy between two apparently disparate words.
For example, in lines 6 and 8 rhyme the words “lyres” and “fires” (a nifty double feminine ending, which rhymes both the stressed and unstressed syllables of the two words). At first, it doesn’t seem like there’s much of a relationship between the lyre, a stringed instrument that poets in ancient Greece played as they sang their poems, and fire. Indeed, the lyres are “broken” while the fires are contained and peaceful, “household fires.” The fires seem like the one source of solace in an otherwise bleak and forbidding world. But the rhyme makes the reader pause to think about the relationship between them—and the broken lyres cast an ominous shadow over the “household fires.” The lyre is a traditional symbol of poetry—and, more broadly, of the glory of Western civilization—so connecting damaged ones to fires reminds the reader that these seemingly tame "household fires" might have serious consequences for society. Perhaps the poem is suggesting that hiding out at home is actually making things more dangerous for "all mankind," rather than safer.
By contrast, in lines 21-23, there is a slant rhyme between “small” and “soul.” Here the failure of the rhyme highlights the speaker’s point. Though the thrush may be “frail, gaunt, and small,” his soul is not: his soul is full of hope, song, and life. The imperfect rhyme emphasizes the disconnect between the bird’s body and its soul. And in so doing, it suggests a broader lesson for both speaker and reader: that the bleak appearance of things may contain a rich and hopeful interior. In this instance, then, the poem's simple rhymes shed light on the broader religious and philosophical questions the poem raises.
-
-
“The Darkling Thrush” Speaker
-
The speaker of “The Darkling Thrush” is an anonymous person. Though the reader does not learn much about details like the speaker’s class, race, gender, or age, the poem does reveal about a lot about the speaker’s priorities and interests.
Almost the whole poem consists of the speaker describing things—a winter landscape, a singing bird. The reader can learn about the speaker by watching the speaker in action, by seeing the way that he or she describes the world and the things that he or she finds interesting or surprising. It is immediately evident, for instance, that the speaker has an unusually bleak view of the world. As the speaker describes the landscape on a winter’s day, he or she focuses on its desolation. The "Frost" reminds the speaker of a “spectre”—a ghost (rather than something cheerful like, say, winter holidays). The speaker’s emotions seem to depend on the condition of the natural world. But, at the same time, the speaker’s emotions lead him or her to interpret the natural world in severe and dark terms.
However, the speaker’s despair is not impenetrable: in the second half of the poem, a singing thrush reminds the speaker that hope and joy are possible. The speaker describes this hope in striking religious terms, calling it “blessed” in line 31. Further, the speaker compares the bird’s song to “evensong”—the evening prayers in Anglican churches. This suggests that the speaker’s despair is in part a consequence of religious doubts. Perhaps the speaker is experiencing a crisis of faith, or perhaps the speaker’s anxieties are related to society more broadly. Hardy wrote the poem in 1900, and it seems to reflect on the previous century, describing it as a “corpse.” The speaker may feel that society is failing or losing its promise—and that a return to religion will help restore it and give reason for hope. The unnamed speaker’s anxieties are thus deeply personal, but they also expand to include fundamental issues of faith and society, issues that the poem hopes to help resolve.
-
-
“The Darkling Thrush” Setting
-
“The Darkling Thrush” is set in a winter landscape, most likely England at the turn of the twentieth century. The poet, Thomas Hardy, spent his life in England and wrote this poem there in the winter of 1900.
The landscape is agricultural and sparsely populated; its topography is rugged and harsh. The speaker seems to be looking out over it, and behind the speaker is a "coppice," a kind forest which people sometimes cut back to stimulate its growth. Though the coppice should be a managed space, it seems to have been poorly maintained. Although it’s winter, the speaker notes that his or her view of the sky is obscured by climbing vines—weeds. It has been a while, perhaps too long, since the forest has been cut back. The people who are supposed to take care of it are missing in action. Indeed, the poem itself is largely devoid of human life: the weather is so bad that everyone but the speaker is indoors, at their "household fires." The setting of the poem is thus desolate and unpopulated. It seems to reflect the speaker’s mood, which is as bleak as the landscape he or she describes.
-
-
Literary and Historical Context of “The Darkling Thrush”
-
Literary Context
“The Darkling Thrush” is a ballad. The ballad is a very old folk form of English poetry. Over its long history, it was used for a wide range of poetry: from religious hymns sung in English churches, to drinking songs, to popular poems about murderers, thieves, and star-crossed lovers. After he stopped writing novels and dedicated himself exclusively to poetry, Hardy turned often to the ballad. His ballads tend to be morally and intellectually serious, drawing on the tradition of hymns rather than drinking songs or scandalous popular verse. But his interest in the ballad has less to do with its traditional content and more to do with its deep history in English literature.
At the time Hardy wrote his poems, poets in England, France, and Italy were increasingly questioning the traditions and forms of poetry, often inventing new ways of writing. This was called modernism, a broad literary movement that emerged from the rapid urbanization and industrialization of society in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The modernists attempted to develop new literary techniques and forms that would be adequate to the new realities of an industrial society.
Hardy was familiar with these developments, but he responded to his changing society in a different way than the modernists did. Instead of attempting to develop new literary forms, he sought the oldest forms available to him, especially ones that were closely connected with the English language. Although the ballad was invented in France, it is strongly associated with native English poetic tradition and has often been used by poets who want to return to something essentially "English" in their poetry. In this spirit, Hardy hoped that this venerable form would help him recover something authentic about the English language at a time when his society was undergoing rapid transformation. Although Hardy is now better remembered for his novels than his poems, his resistance to modernism and his work reviving the ballad made him important to later of anti-modernist poets. For example, Hardy was a central figure for the group of young British poets called “the Movement” in the early 1950s, which included major figures like Thom Gunn and Ted Hughes.
Historical Context
“The Darkling Thrush” was written in December of 1900. It reflects on the end of the 19th century: in lines 9-10, the speaker describes the landscape he or she views as “the Century’s corpse outleant.” The poem takes a bleak view of the historical moment it describes; the speaker seems to feel that all hope and possibility have been stripped from the landscape that he or she views. The speaker does not specify which historical developments inspire this sense of desolation and despair, but the reader can make some guesses based on the way the speaker describes the landscape.
First, the speaker is unable to see any other people; they’ve all gone inside to sit by their fires. The poem thus expresses a deep sense of loneliness and a loss of human community. This is likely related to the rapid urbanization and industrialization of England in the 19th century, a process which depopulated rural areas (like the one the speaker describes in “The Darkling Thrush”). It also produced large urban populations, in which individuals often felt rootless, anonymous, and cut off from their communities.
The poem meditates on both sides of this social condition: the depopulation of rural communities and the resulting sense of isolation and anonymity, even within large cities full of people. Without people to manage it, the landscape is overgrown and unruly. This is also likely a reflection on the environmental costs of industrialization. The speaker ties the two together, suggesting that industrialization strips the landscape of its people and, in so doing, endangers the landscape itself.
Second, as the speaker describes it, the landscape is a profoundly secular place, stripped of its connection with religion. The possibility of rebirth, so central to Christian theology, seems to have been cut off. As the speaker looks out over the land, he or she sees only death and decay until the thrush appears in stanzas 3 and 4, transforming the world with its incongruous and hopeful song. The speaker describes this song in religious terms, as “evensong”—the traditional evening prayers in an Anglican church—and as something “blessed.”
The bird thus seems to offer a renewed sense of religious commitment and religious feeling. It suggests that the speaker has been personally troubled by religious doubts—but it also suggests that the speaker’s society has had its religious difficulties. Indeed, the 19th century was a time of increasing atheism and secularization across Britain. The poem seems to respond to this historical development by calling for a return to Christianity as the foundation of society. In its response to the industrialization and secularization of English society, the poem offers a conservative solution: it subtly recommends a return to pre-industrial models of human and religious community.
-
-
More “The Darkling Thrush” Resources
-
External Resources
-
What is Evensong? — St. Thomas Church in New York City offers a brief definition and explanation of evensong.
-
The Industrial Revolution — From the British Library, a discussion of the causes and consequences of the Industrial Revolution.
-
Poem of the Week: The Darkling Thrush by Thomas Hardy — Carol Rumens offers a detailed analysis of Hardy's poem in an article for the Guardian newspaper.
-
"The Darkling Thrush" Read Aloud — Tim Gracyk reads "The Darkling Thrush" aloud.
-
More About Thomas Hardy — A detailed biography of Thomas Hardy from the Poetry Foundation.
-
-
LitCharts on Other Poems by Thomas Hardy
-
