It's interesting to me, Robert, that you chose this starkly beautiful poem, and for a very personal reason. I've been struggling with a poem about a boy on a cattlecar being taken to a Siberian labor camp during World War II. I keep putting in and taking out a stanza about a puny winter bird singing amidst the windy rafters, not knowing whether I'd earned the right, and if it was corny, being aware, of course, of Hardy's Thrush. It's the poem about hope, not only for a new century but on a more personal level, about hope for one's kind. Here it's the subject of the poem, the personification of the idea, supported by great skepticism and, yes, hope. The art is the great compression of idea and emotion. We know from his other work, especially his novels, how profoundly skeptical, even cynical, he was (i.e. Jude the Obscure), but hope does break through here, if at the seams. A great choice. It inspires me to keep my puny bird, if possible.

Phil, I marvel at the way Hardy qualifies the hope, conveys that he "could" feel it, but is "unaware." I have struggled, as many writers have, with the kind of issue you describe in you poem-in-progress: to get at the true feeling without corny or empty or automatic "optimism" on one side, and on the other side fussy or empty or automatic "skepticism"-- my quotation marks on the isms indicating the familiar phenomenon, Inadequate But Necessary Abstractions.

As to your "puny" bird-- that's sort of how Hardy presents his bird, perhaps laughing at the comparison with Keats' nightingale. (And himself with Keats?)

Also on the puny bird, a rule of thumb:

When in doubt, leave it out.
When it cannot live without, keep it in.
Split the difference on everything in between.

In relation to the bird, I strongly recommend the Fray thread below, begun by Daniel Bosch, with its information about Hardy's original title for the poem, on first publication-- no bird in the title!

That thread also includes a wonderful response by Jennifer Clarvoe.

I love this poem, but perhaps I read it a bit more “darkling” than others do. It’s a poem of hope but what makes the hope credible and unsentimental to me is that the poem grants so much truth to despair. Despair does get the final word, and the end is shocking that way. Even the earlier stanzas’ talk of being desolate and fervorless does not quite prepare us for the despair of the ending, for being absolutely unaware of any cause for hope. I think if the poem were prose (a passage, say, in an inauguration address!), it would clearly be an affirmation of hope (“there trembled through his happy good-night air some blessed Hope, whereof he knew and I was unaware …”). But I think the line breaks inevitably give an added emphasis to the final line that doesn’t erase the hope but does make it absolutely unsentimental.