It's especially good to read this poem in the northeast, after the solstice, when indeed Hardy's landscape description seems dead-on. I love that he claims he's able to see that this particular singing bird is "aged." It would probably take a keen eye and a profound ornithological knowledge to determine that! But of course Hardy knows we know that, and so the adjective points to a certain playfulness in that over-the-top description of the poor battered singer. I think we're supposed to know that there's a least a little grace-note of comedy (in the form of an ironic self-awareness) here.

But I wanted to point to an earlier 19th century thrush, whose message to the listener's a bit different. It's another bird from Keats, of course:

What The Thrush Said

'O thou whose face hath felt the Winter's wind,
Whose eye has seen the snow-clouds hung in mist,
And the black elm tops 'mong the freezing stars,
To thee the spring will be a harvest-time.
O thou, whose only book has been the light
Of supreme darkness which thou feddest on
Night after night when Phoebus was away,
To thee the Spring shall be a triple morn.
O fret not after knowledge–I have none,
And yet my song comes native with the warmth.
O fret not after knowledge–I have none,
And yet the Evening listens. He who saddens
At thought of idleness cannot be idle,
And he's awake who thinks himself asleep.'

Surely it's no accident that Hardy's final phrase describes that "blessed hope whereof he knew/ and I was unaware." Hardy might well have called his poem "What the Thrush Knew" -- and that "I was unaware" plays beautifully off Keats' last line.

I love how Keats's poems are often/always about time. The end of this poem always makes me think of La Belle Dame Sans Merci, where the knight at arms falls asleep in his dream and then wanders where "no birds sing." Is anyone a better sonnet writer than Keats? Maybe Milton. Definitely Shakespeare but in a different way.

Mark, I'm convinced that Keats-- and this one you cite, along with the Nightingale Ode-- was in TH's mind. I also think of the ancient bird here, with blast-beruffled plume, as autobiographical.

Somewhere among all these threads, Frederick Speers quotes an amazing 1906 bird guide on a thrush's song. Elsewhere, a fascinating discussion of how rhyme probably entered English through Arabic, and Dan Bosch on Hardy's original title for "The Darkling Thrush," when it was first published in a magazine. (In response to Dan Bosch, some terrific paragraphs by Jennifer Clarvoe on Dan's observation of "lean" and "outleant."

In "What the Thrush Said"-- an utterly Hardy-esque title!-- the "light/ Of supreme darkness" does seem to re-enforce the connection. (The "darkling" thread here adds Matthew Arnold's "Dover Beach" to the echo-chamber.)

Phew. As I've said on other threads, I wonder if we have too many separate threads, and if I should ask the Slate web-masters to help me figure out a way to connect the separate lines more effectively. Though up to a point I'm glad to serve as a router, directing y'all to various threads. Is that necessary, or are people doing it anyway?

don't worry Robert, people are reading the threads. The one thing that might make life easier for you would be if you could link from one thread to another, so that people could jump to the thread you are referencing. I have no idea how hard that would be to do, I suspect not, it might already be possible.

I agree with Matthew, though it also seems it wouldn't hurt a thing for this all to be on one big thread or two, since everyone's cross-referencing. And also that there's not another sonnet-maker I'd rather read.

It's interesting that Keats has his thrush tell us twice, "o fret not after knowledge -- I have none," as if to make it quite clear that the singer in question knows quite a bit, though believe he does not. This paradox -- the wisdom that resides in not claiming knowledge -- perhaps makes us likelier, as 21st century readers, to trust this bird over Hardy's, who knows that hope with an undeniable certainty.

But then maybe that's something of what it is to be a bird, or a body: a physically experienced faith in a future.

I agree that it’s not a big deal but that it probably would be (would have been) ideal if everything were included in one long thread in chronological order. I suspect that horse has already left the Hardy-esque barn, though, and this wonderful discussion cannot be rethreaded now.

Hardy seems to be a master at intensifying the emotion of a poem by the use of rather incongruous forms, “light” song forms conveying despair, as in, maybe most memorably, “The Voice,” where the elaborate form and “light and bubbly” three-syllable rhymes only intensify the personal memories of his dead wife:

Woman much missed, how you call to me, call to me,

Saying that now you were not as you were

When you had changed from the one who was all to me …

Basil Bunting offers this one:

A thrush in the syringa sings.

'Hunger ruffles my wings, fear,
lust, familiar things.

Death thrusts hard. My sons
by hawk's beak, by stones,
trusting weak wings
by cat and weasel, die.

Thunder smothers the sky.
From a shaken bush I
list familiar things,
fear, hunger, lust.'

O gay thrush!


1964 (Odes 2.1)

A knockout Bunting poem from Jim Powell.

Mark, a quibble, partly for quibbling's sake: when you say "Hardy's [bird], who knows that hope with an undeniable certainty" I don't think you do enough justice to Hardy's cool recognition that the bird's psychology is dark to him-- that he projects "joy" onto it as he projects funereal human gloom onto the landscape seems indicated by the weird Hardy-ism "illimited": he invents a kind of barbaric neologism that for me makes the thrush quite Other. In other words, a restraint or abstention from knowledge or claiming knowledge not so unlike Keats' "fret not after" . . . but different.

(As to the Threading, I will consult with the experts, try Matthew's suggestion on them, see what can be done for next time, late Jan or early Feb, when I feel encouraged to try this again.)

I'm impressed that Mark and Jim have come up with additional thrush poems. In looking over my Word file on Bird Poems (since I used to be a teacher, I am an obssessive organizer of poems by topic as well as by author), I found most poems were about sparrows, crowns, swans, loons, and hawks. I also have poems about parrots, mourning doves, the ivory-billed woodpecker, and naturally, a few on robins and seagulls.

One of my contemporary favorites is "The Crows Start Demanding Royalties" by Lucia Perillo, in which she refers to crows as "little Elvises." The poem concludes

..............................­.But here in my yard
by the Jack in the Box dumpster
they can only fossick in the grass for remnants

of the world’s stale buns. And this
despite all the crow-poems that have been written
because men like to see themselves as crows
(the head-jerk performed in the rear-view mirror,
the dark brow commanding the rainy weather.)
So I think I know how they must feel:
ripped off, shook down, taken to the cleaners.
What they’d like to do now is smash a phone against a wall.
But they can’t, so each one flies to a bare branch and screams.

Robert, in truth I think you're right. Keats' thrush, in 1818, seems to have every reason to sing, energetically consoling the listener, and the poet has no trouble ventriloquizing him in a very convincing way.

But in 1899 Hardy's assertion is such a qualified one; it's the drear surrounding --nothing to sing about -- that leads the speaker to say "That I could think there trembled through/ His happy good night air/ Some blessed Hope..."

So yes, Hardy's clear that he's projecting an interpretation. But I'm not sure he thinks the bird's unknowable -- he does, after all, call it a "happy good night air" and one could speculate that in a subtle way, ending the penultimate line with "knew" at least points in the direction of that elderly songster being certain.

I think that Bunting poem is amazing, too -- thanks, Jim -- and what a great talking-back to Keats and to Hardy. It's ingenius that the thrush's dire song is framed by a few words from the human speaker, so that here the two kinds of consciousness sit side by side. Does Bunting parody Hardy by lettting us hear what the thrush is really saying, then echoing Hardy's judgement of the song as a "happy good night air"?

A long ways, from 1818 to 1964.

Yes, Mark: "Fear, hunger, lust"-- it does seem that Bunting both pays tribute to Hardy and laughs (or chuckles) at him a little. And the reflections on "my sons" --so clearly artificial, with a sort of brazen, saucy anthropomorphism (hey!-- a six-syllable word!) maybe also reflect on Keats's nightingale? (And thrush?)

(And thanks for those sweet, sweet words, "Robert, I think you're right." A good sentence to read on the first of the year.)

re "illimited": As Paul Breslin notes in his thread, the word - or rather a form of the word - appeared previously once - also connected to a bird, in Bryant's "Waterfowl" (see below) ... "illimitable" ... I don't see as much distinction in Bryant's narrator's position vis-a-vis nature compared to Hardy's as Breslin posits (I think both narrator are knowingly projecting on to their respective birds, as I suggested about Hardy's here yesterday, and both are drawing 'lessons' of sorts in terms of either "hope overriding experience" - in Hardy's case - or the beauty of trusting instinct to navigate rightly amid 'illimitable' possible paths to take).

But this does raise something I wondered about previously in this discussion, first when it was noted that the title had been changed, I wondered if Hardy intentionally redrafted the title precisely to echo Keats and Arnold by not only adding in but foregrounding "darkling"; I had also wondered something that got mentioned explicitly by "princeton67" in his thread, given the capitalization pattern and specifically with "Hope" that echoed Dickinson for me as well. And now I wonder too about a possible conscious echoing on Hardy's part of Bryant with "illimited." I wonder how many other word or phrasing choices in the poem serve as almost 'treasure hunt' pointers to the "shoulders of giants" on whom Hardy builds (or on whom he further despairs, given that by century's end there is no sign that poets' laments, or any other idealizing efforts, have wrought any relief in sight). There are already enough separate quite conscious-seeming allusions to his predecessors to make me think most likely that Hardy renamed the poem purposely to evoke the prior uses of 'darkling' which he realized post-hoc could have been more explicitly tapped in his original draft with this one additional word. Poets do love to make word choices that reverberate and ricochet, no? :-)?

happy new year.


To a Waterfowl
William Cullen Bryant

Whither, midst falling dew,
While glow the heavens with the last steps of day,
Far, through their rosy depths, dost thou pursue
Thy solitary way?
Vainly the fowler's eye
Might mark thy distant flight to do thee wrong,
As, darkly seen against the crimson sky,
Thy figure floats along.

Seek'st thou the plashy brink
Of weedy lake, or marge of river wide,
Or where the rocking billows rise and sink
On the chafed ocean-side?

There is a Power whose care
Teaches thy way along that pathless coast —
The desert and illimitable air —
Lone wandering, but not lost.

All day thy wings have fanned,
At that far height, the cold, thin atmosphere,
Yet stoop not, weary, to the welcome land,
Though the dark night is near.

And soon that toil shall end;
Soon shalt thou find a summer home, and rest,
And scream among thy fellows; reeds shall bend,
Soon, o'er thy sheltered nest.

Thou'rt gone, the abyss of heaven
Hath swallowed up thy form; yet, on my heart
Deeply has sunk the lesson thou hast given,
And shall not soon depart.

He who, from zone to zone,
Guides through the boundless sky thy certain flight,
In the long way that I must tread alone,
Will lead my steps aright.

I wish I had read this thread before posting my own comments earlier today. The Keats sonnet is right to the point. You're right, Robert. The separate threads make for a kind of maze, which is not exactly the maze of the poem or the maze of interpretation.

I'm hopeful that for future "classic poem" discussions we will find a happy medium and better communication or navigation among threads or postings. A somewhat smaller maze, with more conduits and cross-tunnels, maybe. One thing I'm thinking about is that when a given reader on the initial page with the poem and my paragraph on it clicks the "Post a Message" button, a new screen appears, ready for the new post. Maybe instead of that, the list of threads should appear?

As this idea evolves, that is one of my concerns. Another is continued inclusion of the ordinary readers, in particular the usual Fray participants, along with the poets and scholars. As with the Favorite Poem Project, my hope is to have a cultural locus or forum that is welcoming, many-voiced, etc.

I do feel there is something here worth pursuing. Thanks you (all) for helping.

It's absurd to arraign Hardy for projecting human consciousness into his thrush -- his work is everywhere full of the contrary awareness and the poem depends on our understanding the distance between speaker & bird -- and so is the attribution of insentience to wild beings by people who've never met one on his own ground -- whose idea of the wild is Central Park. Hardy knew his animals as he knew his landscape.

In "The Voice," which Robert Thomas cites above, Hardy comes up with a phrase most of his readers would regard as quintessentially his, "wan wistlessness." Like "illimited," though, it turns out to emerge from his pillaging of tradition: he found it in Jack London's account of hopping freights across the United States during the "credit-crash" of the mid 1890s, The Road. Which doesn't make it any less Hardy's: context is all. London describes his pose cadging a meal off a housewife in Reno. Nobody's copyright is infringed, nobody's "originality" impugned. The "ideas" that find these 'influences' troubling arise from the values of a merchantile society, not poetry. I'm sorry Hall cut "The only mystery is the mystery of the everyday" -- it's more provoking than Stevens' verse.