Pessimism in Thomas Hardy’s “The Darkling Thrush”
Thomas Hardy’s writings are often imbued with pessimism, and his poem “The Darkling Thrush” is not an exception. Through the bleakness of the landscape, the narrator’s musings on the century’s finale, and the narrator’s reaction to the songbird, “The Darkling Thrush” reveals Hardy’s preoccupation with time, change, and remorse.
Written in four octaves, “A Darkling Thrush” opens with a view of a desolate winter landscape. With “spectre-grey” frost covering everything in sight (line 2), all joyful colours and sounds are smothered with an intangible film of bleakness. This gloominess is not to be dispersed, for the imagery of “Winter’s dregs” suggests that there exists a residue of the year’s melancholy (3). The burden of the word “dregs” creates a caesura, and the heaviness of the poem is reinforced with alternating lines of iambic tetrameters and iambic trimeters. The tangled bine-stems that scored the sky (5) and “the land’s sharp features” (9) move the miasmal pessimism to a more sharply defined pain that is intensified with the alliteration in “his crypt the cloudy canopy” (11). The “bleak twigs overhead” (18) cast a sharp image of bars stretching across the sky, embracing the gloominess in Hardy’s world. Reflecting the narrator’s sense of perceptions, the dreary landscape mirrors the narrator’s depression and projects his emotions into solid images.
An occasional poem, “A Darkling Thrush” depicts the setting of one century and the birth of another through the narrator’s eyes. Leaning perhaps wearily on the coppice gate, the narrator observes how even the people that haunt the land like soulless wanderers (7) return to their homes where brightly shine their fires, a symbol of passion and rigour. This sense of retreat and disassociation is bolstered by Hardy’s use of diction. Archaic terms such as “coppice gate” (1) and “nigh” (7, 28), as well as archaic inversions of words such as “seemed fervourless as I” (16) suggest nostalgia for the past and anxiety for the future. The emphasis is on endings – the ending of a day, of a year, and of a century. The “weakening eye of day” (4) and the “growing gloom” (24) extend their tentacles of melancholy to the crypt of “the Century’s corpse” (10). This expansiveness reaches back in time as the “ancient pulse of germ and birth/Was shrunken hard and dry” (13-14). The earth, whose lifeblood is being drained from agricultural use and from urbanization, is a cause for grief for Thomas Hardy. He also notes that there is little joy to be found “on terrestrial things” (27). With oppressiveness underscored by the images of endings and of deaths, Hardy’s pessimistic ideas seep through time and space.
That music and poetry contributes to Hardy’s melancholy is evident in the narrator’s reaction to the darkling thrush. A hymn in ababcdcd form, the poem not only embraces lyricism in its structure, but it mourns the loss of the poet’s artistic abilities in its references to the “strings of broken lyres” (6) and the wind that sings “his death-lament” (12). When the darkling thrush arrives in a burst of joyous song following a lively enjambment on “At once a voice arose among/The bleak twigs overhead” (17-18), the narrator refuses to be comforted. Instead, he takes care to note that it is an “aged thrush, frail, gaunt, and small/In blast-beruffled plume” (21-22). Contrasting the frail bird with its “full-hearted evensong” (19), the narrator seems to think it absurd that the songbird should choose to “fling his soul/Upon the growing gloom” (23-24). Thriving in his own spiritual winter, the narrator sees “little cause for carolings” (25). Though there are religious connotations in the words “evensong” (19) and “carolings” (25), the narrator does not pursue further the possibility that God might intervene in his fate, nor does he further probe the “little cause” for hope (25). Alliteration on “That I could think there trembled through” (29) suggests that the narrator ponders the thrush’s song gravely, keeping in mind his own plight. Concluding that the thrush knows some “blessed Hope” (31) of which he is “unaware” (32), the narrator ultimately dismisses even the smallest cause for hope. The thrush’s exuberance seeps into the narrator’s life for a brief moment, revealing to him a life lived to the fullest, yet the narrator remains unconvinced and melancholy.
Submerging “The Darkling Thrush” in a dreary landscape devoid of life and colour, Thomas Hardy is able to weave pessimism into his work, providing a core of bleak emotions for his narrator, who sees no hope for the empty society he lives in. Even when he catches a glimpse of cheerfulness from an old thrush, the narrator declares his personal plight excluded from the possible causes of joy. With all signs of hope criticized as being absurd, Thomas Hardy’s “The Darkling Thrush” conveys a purely pessimistic view.
WORK CITED
Hardy, Thomas, “The Darkling Thrush.” 1900. The Norton Anthology of English
Literature. 7th ed. 2 vols. New York: Norton, 2000. 2: 1935-1936.