The Darkling Thrush by Thomas Hardy
This post was originally published on February 21, 2021 over WordPress.com: https://proclivitiesprinciplewisdom.wordpress.com/2021/02/21/the-darkling-thrush-by-thomas-hardy/
According to Edwin Arlington Robinson, “poetry is a language that tells, through a more or less emotional reaction, something that cannot be said.” Evaluating poems can be, among other things, a way to learn something about yourself, for what you like in poetry says a lot about where your values lie.
The following poem particularly appealed to me for a few different reasons. For one, it carefully details, in poetic verse, the harshness of wintery cold’s abandon and its invisible grip on the living, forcing all observing its power to watch its influence drape over us in icy sparkling disgrace. Its power of censure over life haunts the human psyche connecting Life with Death. In the season’s abject response to all that thrive, we question, can even a germ of new birth survive a winter’s harsh cold? With winter’s cold abandon, the season forces a struggle against life’s consummate end. As a writing, this poem mimics the Natural School of writers, and it seems to me, a salutation in Dostoevskian style of a harsh Petersburg life. As the poem followed the close of the 19th century. Its birth lingers at the cusp of the early 20th century as Harding wrote this poem on December 31, 1900.
The other reason I’m inclined to admire this poem, is in its description of winter, using words like crypt, corpse, broken, and shrunken, and then attempts to connect it to the living with words like full-hearted joy, and ecstatic caroling song which bridges the gap between the vibrance of life and the abjection of death. In the psychoanalytic theory of the Real, in the work of Julia Kristeva, the poem reads wintery Silence in astute observation and brings Voice to something that can only be faintly perceived in the human mind because Death is something that exists beyond language in the human unconscious. That is why it is difficult for a subject to perceive death as a human possibility. Death is usually veiled in symbolism and signs in the human unconscious in dreams. This poem brings to life, as in an eruption dream of the Real, the ambiguous state of abjection where subject and object become blurred in the realm of ambiguities and paradoxes. The prospect of Death bringing a full-hearted joy is something of a paradox. In the unconscious realm of dreams, the eruption of the Real, in this state of the abject, a corpse would symbolize this wintery state of being “cast down” and the poem’s symbols reveal winter’s power over the living. This “wintery power,” as a state of abjection, outside of language in the human unconscious, is brought to our conscious awareness through the poem’s symbolism similar to the symbols given us in dreams. In the religious spirit of hope in an Afterlife, we hear the author symbolize Hope in the aged thrush’s joyful song of which the author is unaware as to why this bird would seem so joyful.
The Darkling Thrush
by Thomas Harding
I leant upon a coppice gate
When Frost was specter gray,
And Winter's dregs made desolate
The weakening eye of day.
The tangled bine-stems scored the sky
Like strings of broken lyres,
And all mankind that haunted nigh
Had sought their household fires.The land's sharp features seemed to be
The Century's corpse outleant,
His crypt the cloudy canopy,
The wind his death-lament.
The ancient pulse of germ and birth
Was shrunken hard and dry,
And every spirit upon the earth
Seemed fervorless as I.At once a voice arose among
The bleak twigs overhead
In a full-hearted evensong
Of joy illimited;An aged thrush, frail, gaunt, and small,
In blast-beruffled plume,
Had chosen thus to fling his soul
Upon the growing gloom.So little cause for caroling
Of such ecstatic sound
Was written on terrestrial things
Afar or nigh around,
That I could think there trembled through
His happy good-night air
Some blessed Hope, whereof he knew
And I was unaware.
But what if the poem presented no such bridge between Death and the living song of Hope the aged thrush sings? We would be presented with nothing more than the icy chilling fingers of a wintery cold Death in the depths of a frigid stone crypt and in the presence of a ghostly gray spectered corpse; dank, dark, and isolated.
