Thanks for reminding us of this truly amazing poem. My thoughts went immediately to Matthew Arnold, "Dover Beach" -- I thought at first it was because I felt a similarity in the sentiments of the two poems, a sense of dreadful limnality (I feel less convinced of the positive or hopeful nature of the end of the Hardy poem, maybe because I just find it hard to believe that Hardy ever was any kind of an optimist). But actually even though my conscious mind can't keep one single line of poetry in it, I must have somewhere unbeknownst remembered the use of the word "darkling" which draws a great line from Keats through Arnold to Hardy.
And we are here as on a darkling plainSwept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,Where ignorant armies clash by night. It's pretty awesome (in the literal sense of that word) to read "Ode to a Nightingale," "Dover Beach" and "The Darkling Thrush" all in a row. Really a history of one very important strand of 19th century poetry, sending us headlong into modernism.

Yes the word "darkling" with its peculiar quality of sounding both diminutive and heroic, does knit those three poems together-- the history of the 19th Century implicit in the strands of connection and difference,

Matthew, your thoughts about "darkling" here somewhat resemble Daniel Bosh on "leant" and "outleant," as picked up by Jennifer Clarvoe in another thread here.

Matthew, I think you touched on something about this poem that makes it so particularly pleasurable to teach--it does such an absolutely perfect job of introducing students to the nuance of word choice and tone. You can tell them "every word counts," but nothing demonstrates this so well for me as "The Darkling Thrush."

As you might guess, and against some good biographical and textual evidence, I persist in believing that Hardy left a small (if uncommitted) philosophical space for that possibility of hope of which his speaker is unaware. I WANT TO BELIEVE, as Fox Mulder would say. But it's wonderfully fun to have a whole classroom debating this for a solid hour, culling through every phrase and tense to support their arguments. This is one of those great poems that offer us a rare chance to know our beliefs deeply.

A great example of the insistence of choices building a weighty mood, an unrelenting insistence setting up intense desire for reversal: spectre-gray, dregs, desolate, weakening, broken, haunted, and this in the first stanza alone. I particularly admire the work done with the phrase "little cause" as the poem takes its turn toward the possibility of Hope. Syllogistically, the near-overwhelming improbability of a source for "ecstatic sound" makes the turn toward the celebratory more engaging to the speaker, suggesting that Nature knows, in the face of all gloom of weather and human feeling, something to brisk us up with were we to let its bird (to instance Wordsworth among the poets others have assembled here) be "our teacher."

First of all, sorry about the crummy formatting. The lines I meant to quote are:

And we are here as on a darkling plain

Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,

Where ignorant armies clash by night.

Erin, that's a great point, I agree with you about the poem leaving a space for hope. A poem can be the expression of a desire to hope/believe while simultaneously providing the very condition that makes it almost impossible to do so. That seems like a fundamentally religious notion.

I love those poems that produce those discussions in class. Another poet who is great to debate in terms of degree of hope is Frost. "The Oven Bird" for instance is a poem that leaves a lot of space for either despair or hope glimmer (though people can really get hung up on : "He says that leaves are old and that for flowers/ Mid-summer is to spring as one to ten," and the whole thing can just disintegrate into a math class. Ugh.

I also really like the idea that a great poem would enact (and further reveal itself in discussion) the possibility of clarity without moralizing. Which leads us back to Keats and Negative Capability. As always.

It reminds me, as well, of a strand of mid twentieth-century British political thought (Tolkien and Orwell come to mind) that the cure for the great darkness settling over the world was, more or less, being English. Home and hearth and Hobbits.

That particular strand is interesting in this context because the modernism of, say George Orwell is tempered with a fair bit of pastoral nostalgia. My British poetry is weak, but I guess I think of Dylan Thomas. In the U.S., Robert Frost would certainly fit that category. Then I wonder -- for what other writers is the appeal of home and hearth a specifically modern, or modernist, sentiment? Lots, I'm sure, it's just not a section of the canon that I have spent a lot of time with.

WC Williams

Thanks for posting this poem again, Robert. I agree there’s a nod to Keats here, and not just in words but spirit: Looks like Hardy's thrush ain’t made for death, either.

I have a few tentative notes of my own to add to this darkling thread.

Like others, after reading the poem—and in my case, during a long subway ride home from work—I let my mind wander through associations large and small, some concerted, some unfocused: from pressing issues of modernity (Dover Beach’s own “darkling connection,” that Matthew combed) to various cameos of birds in American poems (wow, there are too many—Poe’s persistent raven, naturally; Frost's head-in-the-Oven Bird; Steven’s excitable chorister, whose premature “C” nevertheless became part of that “colossal sound”; and Dickinson’s “thing with feathers…” ah, there’s that Hope again). Then, as the Q-train began to cross the Manhattan bridge, I heard Nina Simon's voice slide up on my Shuffle, with her “Birds flying high in the sky / You know how I feel,” that heart-breaking high-note of hope, similarly sung by another modern bard of sorrow. Of course, Hardy’s hesitations prevent such a pathetic fallacy from taking place with his bird (his final word: his awareness is not the bird's).

Taken together, these half-random constellations in my mind made me wonder further where the poet of “Neutral Tones” might have us arrange his poem’s “Hope” along the human scale, on which line of the staff he’d have his thrush perched. On a “blessed” note, to be sure, but in a minor key, no doubt.

This poem also made me wonder again if the soul must always be defined in literature by some uncertainty (“tremble”) or impermanence (“fling”); however “illimited” it may be, the soul won’t be here long, will it? Or if does stay, it won't stay the same: The thrush has his age, his plume is "blast-beruffled."

Among all the great verbal inventions that stayed with me from the poem, there was also that simple yet confounding throw-back of a conjunction, “whereof.” Which had be consider: Maybe the attachments of hope, and not hope's nature, are the true(r) mystery.

At home, just now, I re-read the poem, this time aloud (no officemates to disturb), experimenting with other mysteries, like where to place stresses, what to emphasize—based on what the poem was telling me in its ballad form, its possible cadences inherent therein and the tension among the lines and sentences. Then, for no immediate reason, I remembered a passage about bird song from an early 20th century field book of birds, with its claim that birds’ “[w]ild music…is not amenable in any respect to law….” And yet bird song can be scored. Maybe it’s one of the interesting things about parsing the syllables of bird-song that could also apply to reading Hardy’s poetry: in both, the given rhythm is modulated by the variation of individual lines, their shifting beats.

The example I found in this 1906 field guide is of an American Olive-Backed Thrush, who sings, as we might phrase it, “I love, I love, I love, I love you!,” where the final three words (“I love you”) are about four-times faster than the first six words (the three “I love’s” are a quarter note in length, the final triplet are shown as sixteenth notes). The author of the field guide then adds this observation below the musical staff: “Like all the northern Thrushes, he is a transcendentalist, who is never satisfied with a creditable effort, but must try for something better and then ‘goes to pieces’ in the attempt!”

Something tells me Hardy isn't easily satisfied either. For a parallel to the real-world thrush’s variations on a theme, I look to “The tangled bine-stems scored the sky,” an expected eight-syllable line, conforming to the initial pattern—true, but while you can *make* it have four clear beats, you have to admit it's more complex than, say, the first line of the poem that sets the pace, where the four beats are much clearer. If “bine-stems” is a spondee, that would give the line an unexpected five beats (I’m not sure if that makes the line faster or shorter, actually). There are other examples of what I’m calling Hardy’s wild music, I think: “The bleak twigs overhead” is where the voice comes from, but this rhythmically rich line resists the sing-songy iambic-tetrameter of its subject line before, “At once a voice arose among....” Yeah, in many instances in this poem I wonder, whereof the beat?

There’s something about such musical resistance that makes Hardy’s “Hope” that much more audible, to me, than all of the poems otherwise rhetorical maneuverings. Though, those are nice too.

A bit more on "darkling" from Adrian Barlow's excellent book --- <link> © Cambridge University Press www.cambridge.org Cambridge University Press 978-0-521-71247-7 - World and Time: Teaching Literature in Context Adrian Barlow Contextual and intertextual study How do writers talk to each other, and to us? Several of the texts discussed in Chapters 7 to 11 of this book make direct or indirect reference to other texts – and as soon as the connection is made by the reader, that person’s understanding of the original text is enlarged. A good illustration of this to discuss with students is Thomas Hardy’s choice of title for one of his most famous poems, ‘The Darkling Thrush’. Originally he called it ‘By the Century’s Deathbed’, but his change of title introduced a striking word (‘darkling’) not present in the poem itself. In doing so he alerted readers to a famous stanza in Keats’ ‘Ode to a Nightingale’: Darkling I listen; and, for many a time I have been half in love with easeful Death … ‘Darkling’ here means in the dark (Keats’ speaker has just mentioned that he is lying in ‘embalmed darkness’) and the speaker in Hardy’s poem too is both literally and metaphorically in the dark, since it is evening and the world seems on the verge of a new dark age: Hardy is looking forward with scant optimism to the dawn of the 20th century. The thrush likewise is in the dark, but out of the darkness he sings his message of ‘some blessed hope’ which the speaker cannot grasp – just as the nightingale in Keats’ poem sings ‘in full-throated ease’. Thus, by a change of title, Hardy has considerably extended the scope of the poem. The poet compares himself with Keats’ speaker, who longed to escape ‘the weariness, the fever and the fret’ of life, and links the two birds who have the power, through their singing, to suggest the possibility of a different, better world to come. But the word ‘darkling’ is so distinctive – its meaning ‘in the dark’ rather than ‘growing dark’ described by both the OED and Webster’s American Dictionary as ‘poetic’ – that its use in Hardy’s title must set off other echoes. Indeed, a few minutes’ Internet search will enable students to discover that Matthew Arnold, in ‘Dover Beach’ – his famous poem about the loss of faith in the modern world (Hardy’s world too) – refers to the ‘darkling plain’: The world, which seems to lie before us like a land of dreams, So various, so beautiful and so new Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light, Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain; And we are here as on a darkling plain Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight Where ignorant armies clash by night. In that first line, setting up the prospect of a future that turns out to be a bitter disillusionment, Arnold directly echoes and inverts the expulsion of Adam and Eve from the Garden of Eden in Milton’s Paradise Lost: ‘The world lay all before them’. And it is actually Milton who anticipates both Keats and Hardy in linking the word ‘darkling’ with a bird, when in Book III of Paradise Lost he notes how the ‘wakeful bird / Sings darkling’ (ll.38–9). But behind Milton stands, inevitably, Shakespeare. In King Lear, the Fool reminds Lear that: The hedge-sparrow fed the cuckoo so long That it had its head bit off by its young. So, out went the candle, and we were left darkling. (I.iv.214–6)

Frederick Speers' citations from the 1906 text about the thrush, a pleasure in themselves, also remind me that I have read somewhere that nightingales in different regions do sing slightly or quite different songs-- modifying my inclination to think of Keats's "thou wast not born for death, immortal bird" as indicating the monadic, unchanging nature of birdsong, compared to human song.

(Toronto, in an excellent thread begun by Dan Bosch here, he too has interesting things to say about Hardy's original title, as do others later in that thread.)

And in my thread inviting questions for the poetry editor, this matter of echoing predecessors, fitting into a tradition, etc., emerges from David Clemens' thoughtful post.

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.

I read this poem, coming a generation or more after Arnold’s, as being something of a response to “Dover Beach,” even something of a rebuttal perhaps. Arnold’s poem begins in description of an aesthetically pleasing vista/world, which is undone by his movement from sensory to cognitive awareness, perceiving all that is wrong with the world and finding the only refuge to be in a seemingly escapist romantic love. Hardy begins his poem with description of a quite harsh set of visual images, not at all the pleasing world, aesthetically, that Arnold depicted in his first stanza (perhaps reflecting that a generation later the Industrial Revolution, etc., has also now taken its toll on nature as well). Hardy’s world is also blighted by what his cognitions tell him (and thus, on that point, congruent with Arnold’s) but, if the poem is indeed a response to Arnold, then his “fervorlessness” would seem to suggest that even the love and romance Arnold had turned to in despair is not available as escape (a point of view in keeping with Hardy’s novels). Instead, it’s back to nature and a different kind of faith that harkens to Hardy. Not Arnold’s isolationist faith in love, not a human faith at all, but the faith that is caroled by the thrush for “so little cause.” The “sea of faith” is gone for both of them, no more vast reservoir of faith as accepted wisdom, but Hardy’s only hope seems even more elusive than Arnold’s, an inability to find faith or hope in love but still there is this one voice, in nature, that taps into a spirit of hope that embers on.

For me, this poem’s hope is that there is something beyond modernism. The key wordings for me – “So little cause” for the thrush to “fling his soul / Upon the growing gloom” – point to a despair with anything knowable – either by the senses (evoked in the first stanza’s depiction of bleak vista) or by dint of reason (alluded more in the second stanza’s implicit reference in “The Century” to all that progress – at the expense of fervor). Thus, I hear Hardy maintaining all his despair novelized in blighted relationships and countrysides, and turning to a poem to capture the fragility of something another might call faith, something he shows by juxtaposition that he knows nothing about. The thrush’s ecstatic carol is at such total odds (out of the blue) with everything within vision and reason, that it invites simply marveling and hoping. It’s as if he is burying, with the century, any thought that empiricism or rationality might rescue humankind. The only hope is that which comes unbidden without cause – and, pivotally, seems to Hardy to be doing so with reckless abandon (for what else is there?) To “fling his soul/Upon the growing gloom” - at least to my set of connotations for “fling… upon…” – echoes a human gesture, flinging upon a funeral pyre – and thus seems to be (for the thrush? or for the listener?) a potentially death-defying (or death-invoking) act. And yet the only note of hope, because of a sense-defying ecstasy perceived in the sound.

Hmmmmm. All good, Zinya-- a lot in what you say. But he does conclude the poem with "I was unaware" of that hope. And at the other, mid-way conclusion of a stanza, "Fervorless as I," with the lone, final "I" with emphasis suggesting an extreme-- of isolation? or of subjectivity? Or . . . ?

Which is a way of saying that to me the missing term of your discussion is Keats, "Ode to a Nightingale" in which that "I" or "sole self" precedes the terms of Arnold'd poem.

Hmmmm indeed. re "I was unaware" and "fervorless as I" ... On the one hand, yes, I had intended to convey (and so perhaps I was unclear) that i see his alienation from that hope, his isolation, as being virtually total - no love as recourse, not even a "household fire" to go to (and "household fire" itself is a fairly low-affect phrase, not evoking a human warmth to accompany a literal housewarming). The sound of the thrush comes across as inexplicable to him, an overlay of miracle given the lack of any cause for it.

But, on the other hand, it is the narrator who is projecting on the bird, who is 'merely' voicing what is "in its nature" to voice. That it sounds "ecstatic" is a reflection on the narrator's perception, I would say heightened by a certain desperation to hear something (re)vitalizing in the air, and the thrush comes to the rescue, to fill the bill, so to speak. Hardy even seems to make quite clear that he knows he is projecting on to the bird, saying "That I could think there trembled through ..." (ital added) It's the fact that the narrator could think of Hope (with a capital H, putting the word in the company of Century, Frost, and Winter) - projecting on to a creature who could in reality be said to merely be doing what it was 'programmed' to do, to carol into the night, and so it seems to me a struggle of the poet's to rid himself of all that "civilization" which layers over and smudges his direct access to instinct (hm, was it coincidence Freud was off excavating the 'id' at this same century turning point? :-) ... The narrator was unaware of such "blessed Hope" but now his otherwise depressed thinking has grabbed at a straw, one might say, choosing (and that is key, imho) to hear in the thrush both ecstasy and "blessed Hope." To me, the poem is almost existential (or premonitions thereof). Yes, he was (had been) unaware, but more in the sense that he doesn't know how to "get there" - how to translate that glimmer of hope into 'song' (or so he laments) - that he projects at least as coming so naturally to one free of the vision and cognitions that weigh him down - but I would say that his last lines reveal he is aware indeed of its existence, heard - out of longing and also out of reach.

Z, sort of going along with what you say here, Molly Peacock wrote in her toppost --

Hardy's cranky personality identifies more sharply with the century that's over, not with the hope of what is to come. He makes a rational commitment to hope, but he's not emotionally persuaded. (And neither am I.) But that's why this is an appealing poem for our moment: what choice do we have but to make a rational commitment to hope?

MA

And yet it's also worth considering that Hardy identifies with the thrush -- singing without a rational basis at all. He can't actually say how demoralized he feels without making a hopeful sound, or at least a sound that pleases him, threadbare as he feels his choice of imagery may be (corpse-like landscape, broken lyre strings, etc.). Why bother -- and yet he does bother.

AB