Mr. Pinsky,

I have read very little of Hardy's poetry or prose, but I find this poem very moving. For me the key element of the poem is Hardy's willingness to doubt everything, including his own preconceptions about life.

In "The Darkling Thrush" I see and hear two singers, the bird and the speaker of the poem (perhaps Hardy in his own voice). The first singer relies on what he can see, but what he can see is challenged by what he hears.

As the poem begins, the speaker literally leans on the coppice gate, at the intersection of two worlds---the natural and the manmade. Because the coppice has a gate, it is presumably more than a mere "thicket, grove, or growth of small trees" (http://www.merriam-webster.co­m/dictionary/coppice). Instead, this coppice must be a kind of hedgerow, perhaps enclosing a garden, the kind of coppice which is periodically cut back or trimmed to encourage growth and to provide firewood for the local inhabitants that "haunted nigh" and "Had sought their household fires" (the definition of "coppice" given by the Cambridge Advanced Learner's Dictionary online: <link>

Unlike these locals, who haunt the landscape like ghosts, the speaker and the thrush are willing to brave this day's wintry blast. The speaker's "haunting" imagery suggests that in some sense, only he and the thrush are real. In what way are they more real than others? Perhaps it is precisely because only the thrush and the speaker are willing to experience nature directly. The thrush, for example, is described as "An aged thrush, frail, gaunt, and small/In blast-beruffled plume." This is not an oracular bird sent from realms above. It is a very real earthly creature that has suffered all that time and nature can do to one of its own. Yet this bird's "voice arose among/The bleak twigs over-head/In a full-hearted evensong/Of joy illimited." (Why “illimited” rather than “unlimited”? Maybe the word “illimited” suggests a joy not limited by the ills of this world. Or perhaps the word “illimited” is a visual pun on the word “I” which is used four times in the poem along with the word “eye” in the phrase “weakening eye of day,” where the speaker appears to be punning on the words “eye” and “I” to emphasize the personal illusions with which we humans people our natural world.)

Likewise, the speaker of the poem cannot hide from the realities of man and nature which he sees around him. As he leans on the coppice gate, what does the speaker seearound him? First, the speaker notices the evidence of man’s attempts to limit and direct nature. The gate and the coppice itself provide evidence of human endeavor to control nature, especially the detail of “The tangled bine-stems” that “scored the sky/Like strings of broken lyres.” Those bine-stems that reach toward the sky remind us that the coppice is the result of a kind of human editing of nature. Those bines have been repeatedly cropped and shaped by human hands and human desires. And those human needs and desires have produced a message or song that is scored or etched on the sky. Sadly, the speaker recognizes that these messages are not messages sent to man from above; on the contrary, they are attempts by earth-bound men and women to define the heavens, a fact underscored by the resemblance between the bine-stems and “strings of broken lyres,” the traditional instruments of ancient bards. Here the speaker indicates that the evidence of all he sees convinces him that the traditional notion of an earth derived from and ruled by a more perfect heavenly realm is nothing more than a pleasant illusion, a poet’s elysium which he can no longer celebrate since to him it is a lie. And the fact that all the other inhabitants that haunt this place are safely inside, sheltered from nature’s rawness, tells the speaker that other human beings are hiding from the unpleasant truths about life which he cannot ignore. Perhaps this is why he says that the land “seemed to be/The Century's corpse outleant,/His crypt the cloudy canopy.” The land is evidence of an idea that is untrue, that is dead. And the sky or heavens is the limit that defines us as human beings as it offers evidence that man’s traditional poetic ideas of the heavens are untrue.

Curiously, it is at this point that the speaker hears the bird. At first, he does not see the bird; he hears its song. And its song is “full-hearted” and “ecstatic,” not at all like the “fervorless” song which the speaker has been singing about the comforting lies we tell ourselves about the natural order and our place in it. This song is disturbing to the speaker because it does not fit with the appearance of the bird, which is “aged,” “gaunt,” “blast-beruffled,” and “frail,” nor with what the speaker has seen of man and nature as he leaned on the coppice gate. And unlike the ending to “The Oxen,” mentioned in Randy Cauthen’s post, this is a song from one of nature’s unlettered creatures, not a folk-belief or human invention. It is as if nature herself is singing, and the speaker cannot believe the ecstatic tone in the face of so much cold, discomfort, and death. Suddenly the “I” of the poem is challenged to reinterpret what can be seen by the “weakening eye of day.” The night is coming. Death is near. And maybe he has missed something important by relying only on what his eyes can see and what the human “I’ can know about reality. Perhaps the speaker is thinking at this moment that he is no different from all those other human beings who cannot face the truth. Maybe his too is a comforting song constructed to protect a frail and fragile ego’s vision of itself. It is Hardy’s questioning of himself and his challenge to his own most treasured beliefs that I value most in this poem.

Finally, Mr. Pinsky, thank-you for all that you have done to put poetry and literature back at the center of our culture and our lives.