Welcome back to the Daily Poem here in the Close Reeds Podcast Network.

I'm David Kern.

Today's poem is the perfect December poem.

It is a poem that was written toward the end of 1900 in December of 1890

and was first published in a magazine dated December 29th, 1900.

It's by Thomas Hardy and it's called the Darkling Thrush. He lived from 1840 to 1928. And as

William Harmon mentions in his anthology the classic 100 poems, Thomas Hardy was a poet whom Ezra Pound, John Crow, Ransom,

W. H. I. I. and Dylan Thomas and Philip Larkin all looked to as an influencer in their own work.

Among many readers, Thomas Hardy can be thought of as a depressing poet. So I will be curious to know

if you think that this, the Darkling Thrush, is a depressing poem.

This is how it goes.

I linked upon a coppice gate when frost was spectre gray, and winter's dregs made desolate the

weakening eye of day.

The tangled bind stems scored the sky like strings of broken liars, and all mankind that

haunted Nye had sought their household fires. The land's sharp features seemed to be the

century's corpse outlent, his crypt the cloudy canopy, The wind his death lament.

The ancient pulse of germ and birth was shrunken, hard and dry,

And every spirit upon earth seemed fervorless as I.

At once a voice arose among the bleak twigs overhead,

In a full-hearted, even song 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. So little cause for carolings of such ecstatic sound

was written non-terrestrial things afar or nigh around

...