Let’s assume that the scene reflects a mood that may strike us at any time, one in which it seems that “The ancient pulse of germ and birth/Was shrunken hard and dry”. Of course, the life cycle has not ceased, children will be born, grow old, and die, just like the Century, but for the moment this is mere fact; we are not able to feel the consolation that generation affords in the face of mortality, we see only the end. Marriage bed and death bed have collapsed into one. This pulse of germ and birth may also suggest the activity of imagination, giving life to the insensate earth, so that in its dessication nature and “art” have failed together. Certainly the image of “bine-stems” as the broken strings of a lyre reinforces this notion of joint dependency and joint failure. What, then, does the thrush offer? It is difficult not to “read” the thrush as the poet, but the distinction seems to be pointed. Yet if the thrush is not art, and not nature, what remains but the religious “Hope” that transcends both and eludes the poet? This seems obvious, but is not a satisfying last word for much of the modern audience, because it leaves the human behind. This of course may be just the point: the speaker, who cannot go beyond the human, is forever cut off from religious consolation even as it calls to him. Why, then, does the poem leave us with an impression that is not finally desolate? Perhaps because the thrush, looked at from another angle, does in fact undercut the speaker’s despair, embodying the living unity of art and nature, the pulse of life, that, like the spring, will after all return, although not as a “Truth” transcending human life. Not to glide over the point: the loss of Truth is a real and permanent loss, but it is not in our nature to live in perpetual winter without an answering song, and that song will return in the face of, and even, sometimes, in the form of, the death lament.
