Thomas Hardy's "The Darkling Thrush"
The Daily Poem
Goldberry Studios
4.6 • 729 Ratings
🗓️ 12 December 2023
⏱️ 7 minutes
🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS
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Summary
Thomas Hardy (born June 2, 1840 - died January 11, 1928) was born in Dorset, England. The son of a stone mason, he trained as an architect and worked in London and Dorset for ten years.
Hardy began his writing career as a novelist, publishing Desperate Remedies (Tinsley Brothers) in 1871, and was soon successful enough to leave the field of architecture for writing. His novels Tess of the D’Urbervilles (Osgood McIlvaine & Co., 1891) and Jude the Obscure (Osgood McIlvaine & Co., 1895), which are considered literary classics today, received negative reviews upon publication. He left fiction writing for poetry and published eight collections, including Poems of the Past and the Present (Harper & Bros., 1902) and Satires of Circumstance (Macmillan, 1914).
Hardy’s poetry explores a fatalist outlook against the dark, rugged landscape of his native Dorset. He rejected the Victorian belief in a benevolent God, and much of his poetry reads as a sardonic lament on the bleakness of the human condition. A traditionalist in technique, he nevertheless forged a highly original style, combining rough-hewn rhythms and colloquial diction with a variety of meters and stanzaic forms. A significant influence on later poets (including Robert Frost, Wystan Hugh Auden, Dylan Thomas, and Philip Larkin), his influence has increased over the course of the twentieth century, offering a more down-to-earth, less rhetorical alternative to the more mystical and aristocratic precedent of William Butler Yeats.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Welcome back to The Daily Poem, a podcast from Goldberry Studios. I'm Sean Johnson, and today is Tuesday, December 12th, 2003. |
| 0:11.0 | Today's poem is by Thomas Hardy, and it goes out to all of you who may or may not be suffering from seasonal affective disorder. |
| 0:20.4 | It's called The Darkling Thrush. |
| 0:23.3 | I'll read it once, I'll offer a few comments, and then read it a second time. |
| 0:28.8 | The Darkling Thrush |
| 0:30.3 | I lent upon a coppice gate when frost was spectre gray |
| 0:36.2 | and winter's dregs made desolate the weakening |
| 0:38.9 | eye of day. |
| 0:40.5 | The tangled bind stems scored the sky like strings of broken liars, and all mankind |
| 0:45.8 | that haunted nigh had sought their household fires. |
| 0:49.6 | The land sharp features seemed to be the century's corpse outlint. His crypt, his crypt, the cloudy canopy, |
| 0:57.2 | the wind, his death lament. The ancient pulse of germ and birth was shrunken hard and dry, |
| 1:04.0 | and every spirit upon earth seemed ferviless as I. At once a voice arose among the bleak twigs overhead in a full-hearted, even song of joy |
| 1:14.7 | illimited. An aged thrush, frail, gaunt and small, in blast-ber ruffled plume, had chosen thus |
| 1:22.9 | to fling his soul upon the growing gloom. So little cause for carolings of such ecstatic sound |
| 1:30.5 | was written on terrestrial things afar or nigh around |
| 1:34.1 | that I could think there trembled through his happy good-night air, |
| 1:38.6 | some blessed hope whereof he knew and I was unaware. |
| 1:58.5 | This is on the surface, most definitely, a poem about the gloominess of winter months and the pleasant surprise of encountering something in nature that is still |
| 2:04.6 | joyful depending on where you live it's possible to encounter this in plants as well when you |
| 2:14.7 | see a whole host of deciduous trees that have dropped their leaves and look like brown-bent skeletons. |
| 2:24.9 | And then you find a holly bush or a pine tree that's still vividly green and alive. |
... |
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