I'm coming in late on this, but I'm grateful to Robert Pinsky for selecting this poem and reading it aloud so well. There have been some excellent posts on the form of the poem, the meter, rhyme, and occasionally odd word choice or invention, such as "illimited." Let me take a stab instead at what I think Hardy is trying to say.
Very few writers have gotten as much mileage out of pessimism or fatalism as Hardy. In his novels this tends to constrict the freedom of his characters, whose lives are eventually squashed by circumstances, no matter what their initial hopes and dreams. But Hardy lights up his dark views precisely with those tentative, touching, often futile hopes. The end of a century has often been the breeding ground for both apocalyptic foreboding and hopes for rebirth, for a new beginning. Hardy plays on both these themes in this poem, using the traditional romantic trope of the man listening to the song of a bird as a call from another realm, from an ecstatic and unself-conscious nature rather than the troubled mind of man himself.
The first half of the poem is a grim, death-haunted evocation of the old century, saturated with wintry images of aging and dying yet with one tentative pointer towards the future: "the ancient pulse of germ and birth." This is a petrification of the wild but desperate spirit of rebirth in Shelley's "Ode to the West Wind," but even Shelley's conclusion, posed as an open question, is more qualified then most readers have allowed: "If Winter comes, can Spring be far behind?" This is the sentiment of blind hope developed in the second half of Hardy's poem, which allows a shiver of incomprehensible possibility for the incoming century.
An early critic made a literal objection to Keats's immortal and ecstatic nightingale, arguing that the bird was as mortal as the man. Hardy had responded to that kind of quibble in an 1887 poem trying to imagine the physical remains of the actual skylark in Italy that had inspired Shelley's poem. A few pages before "The Darkling Thrush" in his Poems of the Past and the Present, in a poem called "The Caged Thrush Freed and Home Again," Hardy had evoked a bird who mocks man's knowledge and his ability to improve his lot: "Men know but little more than we/ How happy days are made to be." In "The Darkling Thrush," however, the bird, though as aged and battered as the century itself, is allowed a knowledge, or at least a hope, that Hardy himself can hear but not understand.
The source of this hope, for the poet at least, is the contrast between the bird's ""frail, gaunt, and small" being and its "full-hearted evensong/ Of joy illimited." This is a bird that, unlike Keats's or Shelley's, is subject to the same physical limitations, the same death sentence, as man. Yet he has chosen, irrationally, almost suicidally, "to fling his soul/ Upon the dying gloom." The circumstances are not propitious; the land is barren and cold. It offers "little cause for carolings/ Of such ecstatic sound." Like the early Christian theologian, Tertullian, the bird believes because it is absurd, and this paradoxically gives some credibility to a faith the poet merely reports but cannot comprehend, thus concluding the poem of a delicate knife-edge of ambiguity.
Morris Dickstein
