by Lisa Asanuma

Created on: April 18, 2008

In the same spirit as Longfellow's "I Heard the Bells on Christmas Day," Thomas Hardy's "The Darkling Thrush" is a beautifully poignant piece about a man's spirit being lifted by something completely unconscious towards him. The narrator of the poem looks out on a cold, bleak landscape, "The Century's corpse outleant," and the lifeless sight sombers and depresses him. The world seems dead and frozen, and the narrator echoes Hardy's own struggles with faith, in the lines, "And every spirit upon earth/Seemed fervourless as I."

Then all of a sudden, in the midst of this grim landscape, a thrush, old and weatherbeaten, bursts into song, carrying its voice up over the destitute land, almost in defiance of it, and the narrator has to believe that even if he is hopeless, this small bird which is entirely unaware of him has its own reasons to hope, reasons entirely beyond the narrator's understanding. And somehow, that is enough to quell his despair, the same despair Hardy himself may have felt in his older days, as he watched his beloved countryside transforming, and all the things changing that he had once thought unchangeable.

This poem may as well be called a testament to man's ability to find a reason to hope, even in the most hopeless of situations, and for hope to prevail, even when it has not been sought.

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