With Apologies to Thomas Hardy

In order to gain greater understanding of what Hardy was about in "Darkling Thrush," I decided to use his poem for a pattern for an exercise in similarity.

Dark Green Billboard

I heard the cacophonous shriek,
the urban sound released
from motor pools, the grinding squeak
of metal throbbing beasts.
The steely crowd contained in lines
with surging tempers bared,
unending chouse for space designs,
reward for effort dared.

The road’s intense noise appeared
to sound disgust of all
who voice conflicted rage, adhered
to answers that forestall
the questions, counters, oppositions
of rational debate.
The asphalt bully verbally bludgeons
any word that would negate.

Then loomed above the angry throng
a billboard, stark, austere.
A darkened green released headstrong
its white letters up there--
Quiet--someone is thinking!
A bid to back our schools--
a child with books, a mind gleaning
ideas, disruptor's tools.

That billboard child may seem a fix
for our unwilling ears
to hear dissenting words, the bricks
we fling in homegrown jeers.
Difference we fear! The terror crack
the world has felt forecasts
the will we doubt that earth will lack
to stand its own sandblasts.

My first problem in using Hardy's "The Darkling Thrush" as a pattern to generate a poem of my own was to determine an issue that is as over-reaching in this age as the millennial issue was in his age. I decided that the current mania for the singular point of view, the resistance that can be seen in politics and religion, contemporary culture and private patterns of interaction, to entertaining or even listening to an alternate point of view was that issue. I then had to find a metaphorical framework to introduce the idea.

Road rage and the jockeying for the best advantage when driving in traffic seemed to carry the action and the emotion of the issue I chose. I liked the hyperbole that the discord of negotiating traffic brings to my issue. It seems to me to have the same emotional density that the comparison of the age to the crypt had for Hardy. Because this problem is peculiarly urban, the comparison needed to have an urban metaphor. The pathetic fallacy does not resonate with the dawning of the 21st century as it did with the dawning of the 20th, but the anthropomorphic "metal throbbing beasts" and "steely crowd" catches the mechanized age.

In the first two stanzas, I tried to unite sound imagery with my freeway imagery in a pattern similar to Hardy's uniting of death and brokenness to set a moment in time perceived by the alienated voice of the narrator. My moment is as starkly dynamic as his moment is sharply static and sterile. I wanted the dissonance of "cacophonous shriek" and "grinding squeak" to set the mood of discord that results from failed communication, and I wanted to draw a relationship between the willfulness of bucking the lines of traffic and the competitiveness of verbal aggression. In the second stanza, I tried to bring the tenor and vehicle together, climaxing with the image of the "asphalt bully." I think my instincts were right, but my execution of that stanza suffers. While Hardy's second stanza builds the sense of loss with his death vehicle and the stanza becomes stronger than the first, I lose the power of my vehicle, relying on statement of the tenor of the metaphor. When my message intrudes in lines 2-6 of the second stanza, my poetic power is diminished.

My third stanza is designed to carry the corrective that is housed in Hardy's thrush. The image of the billboard works as it successfully unites the urban scene with the opposing notion. The board communicates a corrective to the closed-minded in its argument for thought and its suggestion that ideas have another kind of integrity. The syntax is meant to be disruptive, to cause a halt to the flow of metaphorical traffic, but it risks being too awkward.

The final stanza tries to put the problem in a larger context with its suggestion that the phenomenon stems from a kind of shared global fear. It misses the tone of the Hardy poem in several ways. The movement from the singular narrator to the plural "we" takes on a preachy quality that plagues me. In fact, I did not realize that I had made that shift until I started analyzing the process. Then I had to recognize that I have a tendency to want to beat the reader over the head at the end of many of my poems. The subtle ambiguity of Hardy's last line is completly missed in my effort as is the lighter touch that frees the reader.

Adopting Hardy's rhyme scheme and metrical design may have been the easiest part of the exercise. To write with the restrictions of traditional patterns really becomes a generative structure for the mind. Searching for the right rime and the necessary number of syllables causes my mind to expand itself and embrace alternatives in a way that is oddly freeing.