Poetic Devices in Thomas Hardy’s
The Darkling Thrush
Thomas Hardy (1840-1928) was first known as a British novelist and then as a British poet. It is true that he started writing poetry when he was 17 ( that is when he started writing Domicilium , for example), but he really turned to poetry only when he was in his sixties, perhaps as a new way for him to face reality. Or maybe because he was disappointed by the way people perceived him as a novelist , since it had been said that Jude and The Well-Beloved had not received the reviews Hardy had expected. Either way, Hardy’s poems belong to an English tradition that goes back to Romantic poets like Wordsworth and John Clare, and even beyond them, to the anonymous beginnings of the English lyric in the Middle Ages. Let me explain this: his poetry says that life goes on and that the human beings think and feel much the same way from one generation to another, and that because they feel and think, they are capable of tragedy and of poetry. It is a fact of life. Thomas Hardy had, basically, a Victorian mind , but, like many other Victorians, he accepted “the new thought” –although he felt it as a heavy human loss, because his sensibility remained a religious one. So we could say that he was an interesting mixture of old and new, of Victorianism and Modernism ( for those times, of course!). One of his most famous poems is The Darkling Thrush, written on January 1st 1900 and it belongs to Hardy’s second volume of poetry , entitled Poems of the Past and the Present . This poem is considered one of his best and one of the most representative poems for Thomas Hardy, this is why I have chosen it for this essay. The Darkling Thrush is a poem inspired by the duality between the end of a year and of a century , on one hand, and the beginning of a new year and a new century, on the other hand. More or less metaphorically speaking, this represents the fact that it’s also the end of the Victorian Age and the beginning of a new one. In fact, this poem was first entitled By the Century’s Death-Bed but it would have been too easy and frivolous to leave it that way. “The thrush in the dark” , as the title can be literally translated, is more…metaphorical for Hardy’s way of thinking and feeling. If I have to say now, on the spot, what this poem inspires me, I would have to say the following: winter is bringing death and desolation with it.; a tired old man leans over a coppice gate in a desolate area, seeing ghosts of the past and little hope in the future; the singing of the thrush is the only sign of hope, yet, the man (or the poet) does not perceive that hope. This is, basically, the message and the meaning of the poem, for me. Of course, other people could see something different in it or something more. This is, after all, the purpose of poetry: to inspire different things and different feelings to people. Hardy structured his poem into two equal parts, marking this symmetry with the "voice" that suddenly arises midway along. The first part lacks any such "event," defined as it is in the static field between the poet's "leaning" on the world and the world's "leaning out" from him. The nature is still, “frosty”, like the perspective of death. The action here is in the language, and "the Century's corpse outleant" stands out as an amazing metaphor, one that will find an echo in T. S. Eliot's modern figure of an evening as "a patient etherized upon a table." But the
metaphor also looks back to the nineteenth-century literary "corpus," to which Hardy had himself made so many contributions. Indeed, the sense of the century's corpse as a literary corpus is confirmed when the poet attempts to understand what motivates the voice, what prompts the ecstatic "carolings" of the thrush mid-poem. These, he says, cannot be explained by what is "written on terrestrial things." The landscape becomes the body of an era which offers no grounds for hope. The hope that inspires the caroling must have found its cause elsewhere, in some other part. From a formal point of view, this poem is very precise : it is made of four octaves with each stanza containing two quatrains in hymn measure. It has the typical form of a lyrical ballad –another inspiration of Wordsworth’s and of the Romantic poets. As for the rhythm and rhyme , all that I can say is that they are essential for the interpretation of this poem. The lines change between having 4 and 3 stressed syllables in them, which is called tetrameter (4) and trimeter (3). Since the lines also follow a form of having one unstressed syllable followed by one stressed syllable , we conclude that the rhythm is iambic. As an example I can use the poem’s first stanza. Lines number 1, 3, 5 and 7 each have 4 stressed syllables, therefore a iambic tetrameter ( / - / - / - / - ). Lines number 2, 4, 6, and 8 each have 3 stressed syllables, therefore a iambic trimeter ( / - / - / - ) I leant upon a coppice gate Where Frost was spectre-gray, And Winter’s dregs made desolate The weakening eye of day. The tangled bine-stems scored the sky Like strings of broken lyres, And all mankind that haunted nigh Had sought their household fires. There are two elements which inflict an archaic style to this poem: the form of a literary ballad, which was Wordsworth's solution- “the voice” being a deliberate imitation of an archaic medium- and the archaic words that Hardy uses in his poem ("outleant," "nigh," "coppice gate"). Hardy's archaic style masks the fact that "The Darkling Thrush" was written more than 50 years after the invention of photography, nearly a quarter century after the invention of the typewriter, phonograph and light bulb, and even after the invention of cinema. But he tries to use literary devices which can help him create similar effects in the reader’s mind. Through the use of personification, symbols, comparisons, metaphors, alliteration (this last element may also refer to the poems structure) and a selected sort of words, Hardy produces images in the reader’s mind, when all he really does is just speak from his inner state of mind, as modernists are soon to do. And the awkward syntax , as well as the inexact rhyme anticipate the form of the modern poetry. To show the use of imagery in this poem, I’ve taken its second stanza as an example. Here he uses personification on the landscape, thereby referring to an inanimate object as if it were human. He compares the landscape to a dead body lying all around him, and the clouds
becoming the coffin’s top, and the wind his death lament. The figure of the sun as a “ weakening eye” is also a personification and it establishes the poem’s time as at the closing of a particular day at the end of an era, the day’s last breath. The poet also makes use of alliteration in this poem. An example from this stanza is corpse, crypt, cloudy, canopy etc, where you easily notice the same sounds repeated several times. This has mostly a decorative effect, but it also makes you focus on these words, thereby revealing parts of the poem’s nature and temperament. The land’s sharp features seemed to be The Century’s corpse outleant, His crypt the cloudy canopy, The wind his death-lament. The ancient pulse of germ and birth Was shrunken hard and dry, 6 And every spirit upon earth Seemed fervourless as I. The choice of words in this poem has been carefully selected, leaving little to coincidence. If you look carefully, you notice Hardy using lots of negatively loaded words such as grey, desolate, broken, haunted etc. He himself is all alone out in the cold with all his negatively loaded words. But this changes further on in the poem. In stanza number three you will notice a change in the poets use of diction. Instead of keeping mainly to negatively loaded words, he suddenly makes use of positively loaded words, too. Words like frail, aged, gaunt and small still remains, but you also get words like evensong, full-hearted and joy illimited. This change in diction shows the reader that something new has occurred in the poem. A song-bird has entered, spreading warmth and hope into an earlier desolate and dead landscape. Another thing to bear in mind (in a more of a general matter concerning his poems) as you read Hardy’s poems, is that he chooses to avoid following a “jewelled line”. He doesn’t care for writing just pretty poetry. He breaks with conventions concerning the normal use of language. At once a voice arose among The bleak twigs overhead In a full-hearted evensong Of joy illimited; An aged thrush frail, gaunt and small In blast-beruffled plume, Had chosen thus to fling his soul Upon the growing gloom. In the poem’s last stanza, the man revealing his thoughts to us sees a glimpse of hope, as the song-bird colors the air with its singing. There may be hope after all. Or the illusion of it. So little cause for carolings Of such ecstatic sounds Was written on terrestial things Afar or nigh around,
That I could think there trembled through His happy good-night air Some blessed Hope whereof he knew And I was unaware. I am not very sure how to interpret this last stanza of the poem. Is this an optimistic tone, suggesting that there really is hope, or is it just an impression? And I was unaware… And I was unaware… This line keeps echoing in my mind…Yes, I think I know it now. If there is hope in the world, it is too late for the man, for the voice in the poem. For Hardy, I presume. Duality is, I believe, the key word for this poem. Victorianism and modernism, an old and a new era, death and life , modern and archaic, hope and desolation. The power of the poetic devices is essential to inspire all these feelings . By means of metaphors, rhythm, rhyme, comparisons and alliteration, Thomas Hardy succeeds to create images and sounds to fully entertain his reader, like at the movies. A rather somber movie for my taste, I must confess. But a beautiful one.