The Darkling Thrush

Popular English Romantic poets like John Keats were interested in channeling nature’s aesthetic beauty into a pleasant and thought-provoking sensory experience for their readers. For the Romantics, nature represented a respite from the stresses of modern society. In this resting place, poets might become better in tune with themselves and refine their art in the scenic beauty of their surroundings. Nature was awe-inspiring, mysterious, and ever available as a source of poetic inspiration.

But for Hardy and the Modernists who followed him, nature was indifferent to humankind at best, hostile at worst. In light of contemporary scientific advancements from researchers like Charles Darwin, romanticization of the natural world seemed to fall apart under closer scrutiny. These discoveries—and the pervasive destruction of nature through the process of industrialization—signaled the withdrawal of nature as a consolation and an inspiration for poets.

While Hardy felt affinity for rural places as the site of his childhood—many of his novels are set in the countryside—his portrayal of nature is often more nuanced and pessimistic than those of his contemporaries. In “The Darkling Thrush,” the outdoors offers no comfort to the speaker. The wintry landscape is bleak and oppressive—its sharp edges make him think of corpses rather than new life. The speaker never ventures beyond the safety of the coppice gate, and there is little to suggest he would find anything of value beyond the borders of his village. If an interpretation were as pessimistic as the speaker, then the thrush’s hopeful song might evince nature’s indifference to human misery; the thrush blithely sings like nothing is wrong, though all the world is dead.

Many literary critics identify an existentially pessimistic tone in Hardy’s works. He carries a bleak view of human nature in his novels and his poems. The speaker of “The Darkling Thrush” is, ironically, quite Romantic, in that he projects his inner emotional turmoil onto the world around him (much like the protagonist in Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Raven”). For Hardy’s melodramatic speaker, the grim winter scene is sure proof that everything (and everyone) is awful: “[…] Every spirit upon earth” (Line 15), he thinks, “Seemed fervourless as I” (Line 16).

On the surface, the poem mourns the passing of the century and looks with trepidation on what comes next. On a deeper level, it mourns the loss of religion, the loss of naivety, the loss of old ways of life. It concerns primarily this particular brand of grief, an emotion felt keenly by the Victorians, who watched their world change beyond recognition at breakneck speed.

Nevertheless, Hardy is not necessarily all doom and gloom. In the third stanza he introduces the thrush, a symbol of the power of art and imagination to provide beauty and freedom. While the speaker remains ambivalent at the end of the poem, Hardy’s suggestion seems to be that human change is possible, even if it is unlikely. Even in the direst of circumstances, there may always be reason for artists—the songbirds of society—to choose to sing.