Thomas Hardy is reputed to have written this poem on New Years Eve, 1900, at the

dawn of a new century. It commences in the personal, subjective mode, but the poets
feelings and mood are suggested by his observations of nature, rather than by direct
statements.

The poem is written in the form of a an ode, conventionally a lyric poem in the form of
an address to a particular subject, often written in a lofty, elevated style giving it a
formal tone. However, odes can be written in a more private, personal vein, as in the
reflective way that Thomas Hardy writes this one.

The Title
The title of a poem speaks volumes about it, because through it, the poem must convey
the mood and tone of the poem in a very precise and economic way.

For this particular poem, Thomas Hardy chose a word with tremendous history in
poetry. Darkling means in darkness, or becoming dark, for Hardy can still see the
landscape, and the sun is weakening but not completely set. The word itself goes back
to the mid fifteenth century. Milton, in Paradise Lost Book III describes the nightingale:
the wakeful Bird / Sings darkling, and in shadiest Covert hid / Tunes her nocturnal
Note Keats famously uses the word in his Ode to a Nightingale: Darkling, I listen .
Matthew Arnold, in Dover Beach
writes about the darkling plain.

In other words, this title gives the poem a resonance of past poets and their
thoughts and feelings on a similar subject; it makes specific allusions to these poets and
poems; their echoes become a part of its tradition.

Stanza 1
In the first stanza, we are introduced to the poet, in the first person, I. He is leaning on
a gate in a little wood its traditionally a thinking pose, and the poem conveys his
thoughts and feelings. The bitter hopelessness of a cold winters evening are stressed by
the imagery: Frost, spectre-gray, dregs, desolate, weakening, broken and 'haunted'
are unified and strengthened by their suggestions of cold, weakness, and death or
ghostliness.
There are plenty of heavy, gloomy g sounds: gate, gray, dregs, and equally heavy d
sounds: dregs, desolate and day. Even day, which might be cheering, is described as
desolate and having a weakening eye. The only colour left in the darkling daylight is
gray. There is a tiny whisper of sound in the repeated slight s sounds of coppice,
spectre, dregs and desolate. 'Frost' and 'Winter' have capital letters, as if their presence
is the most important.
The strings of broken lyres is a classic image of disharmony, and perhaps points to a
lack of joy in the poets vision of life. Even the people who have gone home to the
warmth of their fires seem to have assumed a ghostly quality, all mankind that haunted
nigh.

Stanza 2
The second stanza continues the model of the former, if anything in even stronger
terms. The whole past century is a corpse, the cloudy sky its tomb and the winter wind
like the centurys death song. The personification of the century intensifies ones feeling
that it is a real presence.

The imagery in this stanza continues and enlarges on the motif of death contained in the
first. Despite the personal, subjective start of the poem, by the end of the second stanza

Hardy has made his mood an emblem for all life upon earth, and he even suggests that
they very life force is shrunken hard and dry, that life itself is near to exhaustion and
death. This is achieved in an undramatic, almost quiet, manner with a slow build-up to a
terrifying vision of death, driven largely by natural images.

The alliteration in this stanza intensifies the atmosphere of gloom and death. Repeated
cs link centurys corpse, crypt and cloudy canopy. The rhymes of birth and earth
are negated by dry and I. Everything is seen in terms of death: sharp features (of a
dead body), centurys corpse, crypt, death-lament, shrunken hard and dry,
fervourless. It seems that it is not just the death of the old century that Hardy is
describing, but the death of the pulse of life that vitalizes and energizes him and other
people, the death of hope.

Stanza 3
In the third stanza, at the nadir of the poem, the sudden hurling out of its song by a
thrush might be seen as the injection of a rather fatuous optimism into the poem. The
full-hearted evensong/Of joy illimited is certainly a cause for hope.

The choice of bird here is what makes Hardy one of the finest poets: He chooses a an
old, frail, thin, scruffy-looking thrush, not the nightingale of Miltonic and Romantic
tradition. It is an ordinary indigenous song-thrush, but one that is blast-beruffled: it
has survived the strong winter winds, that the poet had hitherto painted as brutal and
uncooperative. The aged and frail thrush is, perhaps facing its own imminent end, and
yet it flings it soul ecstatically upon the darkening evening.The resultant picture of an
ordinary, weather-beaten, thrush rising from the depths of the winter winds with their
death lament singing a beautiful song, is one of hope.

Three run-on lines take us at full tilt to its message: joy illimited (unlimited). The very
words with which Hardy introduces the song are lyrical, rhythmic, repetitive, like the
thrushs song: At once a voice arose among/The bleak twigs overhead. In perfect
iambics, each prefaced by the vowel a, Hardy echoes the sound of the thrushs song: at
once a voice arose among

Stanza 4
In the final stanza, the idea of religious faith is conveyed through the thrushs carolings,
reminiscent of Christmas carols, and the blessed Hope hope being one of the three
great Christian virtues, faith, hope and charity (love).

Hardy is careful not to be sentimental about the thrush. Hardy can see no cause for joy,
but he can hope, that the thrush can see something he himself is unable to perceive. The
poem is thus finely balanced. It suggests there may be hope, and the very sound of the
thrush and its defiance of the prevailing moods shows at the very least the existence of a
tragic hope; life maybe threatened, its physical existence at risk, but its spirit is
indomitable and cannot be crushed.

Overall Poetic Form

The overall rhythm of the poem is regular iambic tetrameter alternated with iambic
trimeter (8 syllables in a line, with the second line in each case having just 6 syllables);
its a ballad stanza rhythm. This regular rhythm, seems to have a slow, joyless effect and
makes the pace slow. The tight rhyming gives strength and authority to the poem, but
the metre is more relaxed, giving a natural and free-flowing feeling to the lines.

A Final Note

The poem is typical of Hardys work in that it shows life on Earth, human as well as
animal, existing under the iron grip of an unsympathetic force, in this case, Nature. In
praising defiance and the unconquerable spirit, it is also typical, and in its firm
unwillingness to state a clear conclusion, balancing hope and pessimism, it could stand
for Hardys poems and novels. The musing tone, use of natural imagery to create and
represent human moods and feelings and the simple rhyme scheme are unobtrusive and
powerful.