Miall -- Hardy "Thrush" commentary

Perkins	Comments
In the world of poetry, which is, of course, active in the mind of each individual reader, poems do not exist in disconnection, but, like all other experience, are constantly jostled and modified by references which they themselves magnetize. A poet will often count on this incipient association in building his poem. Of this "The Darkling Thrush" is a striking instance, and there are even verbal echoes suggesting that the "Ode to a Nightingale," in particular, may have been stirring in Hardy's consciouness (the "Darkling Thrush" recalling "Darkling I listen"; "spectre-gray" echoing "youth grows. ..spectre-thin"; "full-hearted evensong" paralleling "full-throated ease"; the thrush choosing to "fling his soul" with "so little cause for. ..such ecstatic sound," while the nightingale in Keats's ode is "pouring forth thy soul abroad / In such an ecstasy").	Hardy influenced by Keats's "Ode to a Nightingale." Perkins considers the comparison below; but consider also the changed historical position of Hardy (after Darwin, etc.).
But far more important resemblances stem from the dramatic situation in "The Darkling Thrush." For the poem follows a number of lyrics in the nineteenth century which are constructed upon the speaker's emotions in suddenly hearing the song of a bird. In Shelley ("To a Skylark") and Keats ("Ode to a Nightingale"), the bird becomes a symbol of the visionary imagination, or of the soul in secure possession of vision and so lifted into ecstasy, and the speaker then aspires to an identification with the bird. The hope of such identification provides the drive or impetus of both poems, and, at least in Keats, the identification seems for a moment to take place. Average human experience ungraced by vision appears in both poems as a contrast to the symbolic connotations of the bird, and hence as the state of mind from which the speaker hopes to escape. In Hardy's poem, the bird has a similar--and I think more complicated--symbolic reference, but with the implication that there is no hope of closing the gap between speaker and bird.	See also Coleridge's "The Nightingale" (1798), with its references to Milton; the tradition is longer than Perkins has space to mention. In Hardy, does the bird become more like the man? (Romantics: man becomes like, or wishes to become like, the bird.)
Through the course of the poem, the speaker remains mired in a state of mind which the "joy illimited" of the thrush is powerless to modify. In other words, instead of building on a hope and aspiration to share the joy of the thrush, the poem builds upon a hopeless contrast--a contrast all the more poignant from Hardy's characteristic manner of handling his symbol.	Note anthropomorphism of attributing joy to thrush; less tenable in 1900?
For the thrush as a symbol is much more accessible (and potentially more encouraging) than Keats's nightingale or Shelley's skylark. It is itself growing old; it is as chained to the world of time and process as we. Hence identification with it is more possible. Having attributed so much to the nightingale, and associated it with the perfect and eternal, Keats, one feels, had little choice except to let it fly away; the nightingale is finally too remote from mortal life to share it ("no hungry generations tread thee down"). The only alternative would have been to surrender the dramatic situation entirely and to turn, as Shelley does with the skylark, to a hymn of praise and impassioned expression of desire to be like the bird.
Hardy's greater realism keeps the symbol convincing and therefore open. For if the aging thrush can sing while subject as much to the burden of life as anything else--and while lacking, in this wintry landscape, all the Eden-like props with which the romantics surround their bird-symbols--the implication is that mortal joy, though rare, is certainly being attained. Hence the speaker hardly feels able to challenge the rightness of the bird's joy, but in humility and wistful nostalgia states his inability to share it; and the poem presents not a speaker who asserts a mournful pessimism as a necessary reflection from the facts of life, but rather one who feels himself to be incapable of seeing whole, being in some way stunted and incomplete.	Hardy's "realism"? -- undercut by attributing joy to the thrush; and is rather a stoic pessimism, perhaps? And the "facts of life" are radically different by 1900.

Research topic issues

How much is Hardy in debt to prior poets such as Keats, or other literary traditions? > Literary history topic.

As a post-Darwin writer, what is Hardy's understanding of the position and significance of human life? > Cultural history topic.

How does this and/or other poems reflect the changes in rural life and practices that Hardy witnessed during his lifetime? > Historical topic.

Does the pessimism of "The Darkling Thrush" about the end of the century (December 1900) have a wider source, whether in Hardy's own life or his sense of the time? > Biographical and social history topic.

What is Hardy's position and influence in relation to the poets that came after him, especially his "realism" vs. the high modernism initiated by Pound, Eliot, etc.? > Literary history topic.

Thomas Hardy