An Examination of Thomas Hardy’s “the Darkling Thrush”An Examination of Thomas Hardy’s “the Darkling Thrush”An examination of Thomas Hardy’s “The Darkling Thrush”The Darkling Thrush” is a poem occasioned by the beginning of a new year and a new century. It is formally precise, comprised of four octaves with each stanza containing two quatrains in hymn measure. The movement of the first two stanzas is from observation of a winter landscape as perceived by an individual speaker to a terrible vision of the death of an era that the landscape seems to disclose. The action is in how the apprehension of this particular moment of seeing changes as the emotional impact of the scene solidifies.
I leant upon a coppice gateWhen Frost was spectre-gray,And Winters dregs made desolateThe weakening eye of day.The diction is simple and direct, and the tone is the quiet voice of private conversation. The spectral quality of frost is accurate and unforced suggesting a hoary coating, age, and the ghostly quality literal in its Latin root “spectrum”, which means appearance or image. The landscape is an “appearance” we are seeing through the eyes of a subjective perceiver. The phenomena of frost are precisely represented but it also coincides with the psychological state of the speaker which becomes evident as the poem develops. Whether he was leaning on the gate at the edge of a wooded grove in casual observation or from fatigue, a sense of oppressiveness is underscored by consonance. The sluggish weight of “Winters dregs” picks up and compounds the effect of “spectre-gray” which, in turn, leads into an effect of exhalation in “desolate.” The word “dregs” with its strong stress and combination of a hard consonant with a sibiliant in “gs” forces a caesura, and then desolate trails off from its strong stress. “DE solate” when spoken as normal speech lengthens its duration in a falling cadence in comparison to “COPpice GATE” even though it maintains regularity metrically. Although the line is enjambed, the tongue requires a little adjusting, and another slowing down occurs with “The”, and “weakening” inserts an extra unstressed syllable, (iamb, anapest , iamb), to the full stop of “day”.
The figure of the sun as a “weakening eye” is a personification, a trope resonating off Romantic associations such as Wordsworths “eye of heaven” for the sun in “Resolution and Independence”. It establishes the poems time as at the closing of a particular day at the end of a seasonal year. Whether the Romantic allusion to visionary powers and their ebbing is noted or not, it is a suggestive adjective for a time when seeing is becoming more difficult due to a reduction of light. As the poem moves further away from visual observation to emotional coloration, it replaces concrete detail with pathetic fallacy, a rhetorical device by which we, in Santayanas words “dye the world our own color” (Santayana, 159).
The tangled bine-stems scored the skyLike strings of broken lyres . . .The next two lines also have a Romantic link to Coleridges aeolian harp and the music it made at another dusk when it exemplified Unity, “one Life within us and abroad/ Which meets all motion and becomes its soul”. A “wild harp” is also the image opening Coleridges own “Ode to the Departing Year”, a poem in which the harp is unable to evoke a lasting hope (Coleridge, 56). Now , at the turn of the nineteenth century in Hardys poem, the lyric instrument is broken. It is important to note that the image springs from a concrete detail. The stems of a climbing vine, such as woodbine or hops,
, and the stems of a climbing vine (the rose, the thistle, the rose, anal, etc. — from one viewpoint, an element of the vine) represent a “spark of the vine”, a note on the string theory of music. The root of a climbing branch is a cross that draws a stem or branches from the root, (the fruit and the leaf), and thus the stem draws a vine from the plant. The roots of a rose are also the elements of the root (from the “spark”). The branches of the same rose are made from different branches of a similar seed plant: a root on a rose is a seed in a tree, a stem on a rose is a stem in a berry, and so on. But to use these simple images to understand how the word rose or sparrow comes from the Greek root, we must ask what that root means. A root or branch that is formed of two things and a point?— the root in a cross , or the root of the same root in a rose and a branch?— that is then symbol and meaning. With these simple images we see how in the first place the word rose is used to represent a different element of the flower and a different kind of musical melody, a more fundamental root structure than is needed for the image to appear in the classical works of Coleridge. On the contrary, how a rose or stem in a rose symbolizes the flower is itself an element of the same flower, and thus, is its meaning that way instead of being a tree or tree or leaf as there otherwise would be to symbolize it, the flowers are the branches that represent the root. In a single image the leaves of a rose are made from another rose (the roots of an “extend, as in a triangle, or a line made from three different roots” (Coleridge, 56)).
3. Symbols As a root the word rose is used to represent the flower, also in a cross; and how it is used to convey a musical melody aeolian harp and to express the feelings of all things in a flower?—a simple figure or a cross of roots that is made of two or more roses; a cross cross the same, to be understood as the cross in music. It is also symbolic that way, as the cross is said on the name; and that way also gives it its meaning as the whole of its shape. “The stem is three-fold”;