I have loved The Darkling Thrush since I read it in school. There is such a vibrating discord between its elegant diction and sprightly rhythm and the grotesquely grim--comic and nearly crude vision of his feelings and times. I read it alongside of the one that preceeds it in his collected poems, The Last Chrysanthemum. Five of its six stanzas ask what the flower had in mind, what reason, for its heedless bloom in the time of year when "flowers are in their tombs." In the last stanza the speaker wonders why he speaks of the flower as if it "were born/ With sense to work its mind" (an anthropomorphized flower and an anthropomorphized bird) and he concludes "Yet it is but one mask of many worn/ By the Great Face behind." It is hard to see in either of these poems Hardy in propria persona answering his real questions with either real hope for real despair or real submission to the designs of the Great Face. He often uses naive or faux naif or disingenuous speakers.

This is the poet who delights in extravagant rhetoric from early on in his career. How not love "The smile on your mouth was the deadest thing/Alive enough to have strength to die" from Neutral Tones? The "Great Face" and "blessed Hope" are not too far from this extravagance.

Barry, regarding your "He often uses naive or faux naif or disingenuous speakers, " I recognize what you mean at once. This poem seems not one of those, it feels very much like the poet leaning, being fervorless, then unaware, etc. But as several people have suggested here, part of the poem's appeal is the way Hardy both has and doesn't have his elaborate allegory of the century's crypt, corpse, canopy, death-lament: all "seemings" not realities. So that there's a note of self amusement? The "faux-naif" pleasure of building a large, somewhat exaggerated seeming of dark figures?

(You seem almost in conversation with Morris Dickstein's post just after yours, hope you note it):

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Barry Goldensohn:

I have loved The Darkling Thrush since I read it in school. There is such a vibrating discord between its elegant diction and sprightly rhythm and the grotesquely grim--comic and nearly crude vision of his feelings and times. I read it alongside of the one that preceeds it in his collected poems, The Last Chrysanthemum. Five of its six stanzas ask what the flower had in mind, what reason, for its heedless bloom in the time of year when "flowers are in their tombs." In the last stanza the speaker wonders why he speaks of the flower as if it "were born/ With sense to work its mind" (an anthropomorphized flower and an anthropomorphized bird) and he concludes "Yet it is but one mask of many worn/ By the Great Face behind." It is hard to see in either of these poems Hardy in propria persona answering his real questions with either real hope for real despair or real submission to the designs of the Great Face. He often uses naive or faux naif or disingenuous speakers.

This is the poet who delights in extravagant rhetoric from early on in his career. How not love "The smile on your mouth was the deadest thing/Alive enough to have strength to die" from Neutral Tones? The "Great Face" and "blessed Hope" are not too far from this extravagance.

I like that "note of self amusement." I don't think we are very far apart. About Dickstein's provocative response, I'm not sure that Hardy would share Tertullian's certitude about his belief. Tertullian is not having it both ways. He means that if it weren't absurd, he could know the whole revelation rationally, but its absurdity requires belief, not knowledge.

I went back and reread Morris Dickstein's comment and discovered that I misremembered his comment about Tertullian. He is referring to the bird's belief and not Hardy's. I agree with this, since the bird is very human and has beliefs like the rest of us. A comfort.

I think you were right both times Barry. The speaker in the poem does not exactly believe, but he projects onto the bird an incomprehensible full-throated belief whose source is unknown to him. Much was written on another thread of how the bird "had chosen thus to fling his soul/ Upon the growing gloom." I called this suicidal. One reader described this as a metaphorical funeral pyre. What I had in mind was "Empedocles on Etna," the subject of a major poem by Arnold, whose "Dover Beach" is discussed elsewhere because of its fascinating "darkling" connection to both Keats and Hardy. In Arnold's important preface of 1853 he rejected "Empedocles" because of its pessimism (which it shared with nearly all his poetry). He insisted, from his new classical perspective, that no great poetry could be written out of situations "in which the suffering finds no vent in action; in which a continuous state of mental distress is prologed, unrelieved by incident, hope, or resistance; in which there is everything to be endured, nothing to be done."

You might say that Hardy picked up the torch of pessimism that Arnold was casting aside, but learned from Arnold by also dramatizing the alternative--or is the illusion?--of hope, as represented by the thrush.

You sir are a winrar.