Song in an Alien World

Thomas Hardy's "The Darkling Thrush" uses a first person narrator to deliver a kind of elegy or meditation on the death of an age. It's a millennial poem dated on the last day of the nineteenth century and first published as "By the Century's Deathbed."

The narrator is a walker, a watcher, a thinker, a meditative person who employs the classical pathetic fallacy in his tendency to credit nature with human emotions suggesting that nature is as fervourless as he is. His meditation begins with a pause--he leans on the gate of a natural border, and surveying the landscape, he thinks of the correlation between the end of the age and the winter day. His reverie is interrupted by the song of the thrush, a song that calls him to a personal response. He acknowledges that the aging bird sings a song of a hope that alludes him.

The poem is a 4-stanza poem with a regular ababcdcd rhyme scheme. Each stanza has 8 lines of alternating iambic tetrameter and iambic trimeter meter. The structure of the poem is based on a singular moment in time, and like a good lead for a news story, it provides the reader the five W’s of traditional reporting. The first stanza introduces the who and the when of the poem. The second stanza introduces the where, and the third follows with the what. The concluding stanza explores the why or the reason that the circumstance chronicled caught the attention of the narrator.

The tension in the poem is produced by the contrast between the images of death and brokenness and those of hope and joy and between the bird who knew and the man who didn't. The “spectre-gray” of the Frost, the “desolate dregs of Winter,” and the day’s “weakening eye” initiate a time nearing its end. The danger or warning in these signs of a dying age have caused “mankind” that had “haunted” the age to seek the comfort and warmth of “household fires.” Man in this figure has been reduced to a kind of universal ghost. The land is described metaphorically as the “Century’s corpse,” the clouds a “canopy” for its “crypt.” The funeral image is completed with the “death lament of the wind.”

Stanzas one and two have duplicate forms in that the first four lines of each stanza describe the setting in death imagery while the last four lines relate the setting—time or place—to its human inhabitants. The death imagery is continued but the images of brokenness that are entwined in the death imagery predominate. In each case lines five and six form a bridge between these two elements. In stanza one, an extended simile compares the metaphorical musical score that appears on the sky when one looks through the “tangled bine-stems” to the “strings of broken lyres.” The broken strings and the associated sense of cutting or scoring suggest the brokenness of the age that mankind confronts. Additionally, the musical imagery introduced here foreshadows the musical imagery that climaxes the poem. The suggestion is that when the song of life, the joy of life, is gone, man has little alternative but to retreat inward to the fire to warm his deathlike bones. In stanza two, the bridge lines introduce a complex synecdoche for the brokenness of life. When the narrator describes the “pulse of germ and birth” as shrunken, he is using “pulse” as a synecdoche, a part to signify the whole. Pulse, the heartbeat or life force of the world, has virtually lost its vibrancy, its vitality. “Germ and birth” function as two separate figures in much the same way. A single embryo and a single emergence of life are made to stand for the procreation of all life. To describe the pulse as “ancient” is to tap into the timelessness of life and suggest ironically that what has always been has ceased to be. The two stanzas are held together by the dual death images of “haunted” and spirit” used in the concluding lines as well as the return to the pronoun “I.” In this way, the narrator involves himself in the complicity of the death of the age.

Stanza three introduces a response to the first two stanzas with the song of the aged thrush using the same dominant image patterns. The first stanza is referenced with the "bleak twigs" and the "growing gloom." The joy of the "evensong" replaces the broken strings of the first stanza but retains a certain amount of ambiguity in the contrast between the bird and the song. The song is "full-hearted" and "illimited" but it is produced by an "aged" bird that is "frail, gaunt, and small," and the "ecstatic sound" of the fourth stanza contrasts with the "blast" that has beruffled its plume. That it has "chosen" to offer its very soul contrasts vividly with the soul that has been wrenched from the life of the dying age. The narrator sums up this condition with the assertion in stanza four that the "little cause for carolings" is literally "written on terrestrial things," and describes the hope in the bird's "good-night air" as having "trembled."

The darkling thrush is as alienated as is the speaker of the poem. There is a sense in which each is crying in the wilderness. After all, the speaker is the pulsing person amid the hard, dry pulse of the earth. The paradox of the poem is that the world seems to revolve around the speaker, but it ignores him. There is an intense inwardness about the speaker--all mankind has retreated from nature but him. He undoubtedly senses a connection between himself and the bird, yet even the thrush knows something that he has not known. Within the song there is a sense of hope, a voice of correction to the basic thesis of death in the land. That the speaker has not been aware of this hope does not diminish its existence however frail it is.