I love the strain in the word "outleant"--such a determination on Hardy's part to reactivate the speaker's leaning in line 1.

According to the James Gibson edition of The Complete Poems, Hardy was nearly sixty when this poem was first published, in a magazine called "The Graphic," one hundred and eight years ago yesterday.

In that first appearance, "The Darkling Thrush" was even more blatantly "occasional" poem. For publication in "The Graphic," Hardy called it "By the Century's Deathbed."

What a wonderful revision the later title is--one can imagine Hardy realizing, even in 1901, that the first title too severely narrowed the scope of his ruminations. But the sequence of titles may help counter a prejudice that "occasional" poetry is somehow a lesser endeavor.

That's really interesting and good to know.

Hardy, a practical, professional writer, may have helped The Graphic with a title likely to catch a reader's attention . . . and then re-titled his poem in the larger, more evocative way?

(Speaking of titles, how modern and 20th-century the magazine's name must have seemed.)

Daniel:

What a great point about "outleant."

The whole poem leans, doesn't it? And the leaning means opposite things, simultaneously.

(And today, with the wind whipping the skinny branches around the house, I *see* what it means to describe, without being fanciful, a landscape in which ""The tangled bine-stems scored the sky / Like strings of broken lyres.)

Leaning is the stance of both exhaustion *and* of yearning that isn't yet entirely exhausted. He's resting on that gate, and also held back by it, in a way congruent with what Pinsky calls his "skeptical holding back."

"Outleant" has the same doubleness to it -- we know (I guess) that it means something like the extension of the Century's corpse -- but it has the sound of begin "the Century's corpse *outlived.*"

The "seeming" in this poem goes both ways, too: to describe the extent of the desolation -- *and* to hold out hope that something will trump that seeming, as the thrush song does.

And the "trembling" song carries this same doubleness: it trembles because Hope is frail, as the aged bird is frail -- and it trembles as ecstasy trembles, with its fullness.

Even the full-hearted voice in the third stanza sings with that strange, "illimited" joy. I hear this *differently* from the way I hear "unlimited," with the echo of something ill and limited held, not entirely cancelled, in the middle of all that joy.

And isn't it funny that the bird is "aged"? That's nothing one could see (or I don't think one could), but scores Hardy something that the bird's frailty wouldn't on its own. It's the song that's full of joy, not the body -- the song that flings itself past the limits of gate, day's end, body's frailty, terrestrial gloom, Century's corpse.

The doubleness of these words seems necessary, essential to the poem's threshhold occasion. Pinsky says the "subjective observer at least half-creates" the desolation -- and, later, hope -- in the landscape. Tuning his poem with this doubleness, Hardy ensures that his reader, too, participates in this half-creation.
Dark, darkly, darkling, we listen for what we hope to hear...

Daniel and Jennifer, together, give me a new entry into this poem I know well. (It's in that happy category of the poems you get by heart before you realize it, without ever setting out to memorize.)

As Jennifer says, it's the song not the body. And in this one example, the song is heard. Though that does not change the solitary core of the poem, the way the first half ends with "I" and the whole with "I was unaware." Cued by Daniel's "leant"/"outleant" observation, Jennifer associates the action of leaning with both exhaustion and yearning: if you want to read the poem as a reflection on the cultural and political history of the 19th century (see Matthew Zapruder's post in a more recent thread), then Hardy is thinking both about the century's exhaustion and its yearning. As well as his own.

To me, given the rhyme scheme that is in tact throughout (with the exception of "small / soul," although that too could have been closer to a rhyming vowel in British English, especially of the time, than our American ear hears it), I read "outleant" to rhyme to "lament" and thus got a different interpretation of what Hardy might have been playing on in this word - "outleant" spelled to evoke "leant" in the first line but sounded so as to also evoke the notion of "lent out" - loaned out - The Century's corpse having been borrowed too heavily against, almost akin (although probably my projection) to our more postmodern notions of modernism having indeed (economically and technologically at least) having borrowed too heavily - leaned too heavily on, loaned itself out too cavalierly, irresponsibly - vis-a-vis the future.

And for what it's worth, I think I read somewhere than in an even earlier draft Hardy had called the poem "The Audacity of Hope."

I'm glad Robert mentioned this thread elsewhere and brought me here---through this discussion, the poem opens out for me into others--the bare ruined choirs of sonnet 73, and Yeats' soul singing louder for every tatter in its mortal dress!

It's nourishing, I think whether or not one is a poet, to feel that poets are all part of a shared larger enterprise--it reminds us that as humans we are also part of a larger shared enterprise.