IV
"The Darkling Thrush" is, of course, a turn-of-the-century poem. But suppose we didn't look at the date beneath it;
suppose we opened a book and read it cold. People normally don't look at the dates beneath poems; on top of that, Hardy, as I said, wasn't all that systematic about dating his work. Imagine, then, reading it cold and catching the date only in the end. What would you say it's all about?
You'd say it's a nature poem, a description of a landscape. On a cold gray winter day a man strolls through a landscape, you would say; he stops and takes in the view. It's a picture ofdesolation enlivened by the sudden chirping of a bird, and that lifts his spirits. That's what you would say, and you would be right; moreover, that's what the author wants you to think; why, he practically insists on the ordinariness of the scene.
Why? Because he wants you eventually to learn that a new century, a new era—anything new—starts on a gray day, when your spirits are low and there is nothing eye- arresting in sight. That in the beginning there is a gray day, and not exactly a Word. (In about six years you'll be able to check whether or not he was right.) For a turn-of-the-century poem, "The Darkling Thrush" is remarkably unemphatic and devoid of millenarian hoopla. It is so much so that it almost argues against its own chronology; it makes you wonder whether the date wasn't put below the poem afterward, with the benefit of hindsight. And knowing him, one can easily imagine this, for the benefit of hindsight was Hardy's strong suit.
Be that as it may, let's go on with this nature poem, let's fall into his trap. It all starts with "coppice" in the first line. The precision in the naming of this particular type of growth calls the reader's—especially a modern one's—at- tention to itself, implying the centrality of natural phenomena to the speaker's mind as well as his affinity with them. It also creates an odd sense of security at the poem's opening, since a man familiar with the names of thickets, hedges, and plants can't, almost by definition, be fierce or, in any case, dangerous. That is, the voice we are hearing in the first line is that of nature's ally, and this nature, his diction implies, is by and large human-friendly. Besides, he is leaning on that coppice gate, and a leaning posture seldom bodes even mental aggression; if anything, it's rather receptive. Not to mention that the "coppice gate" itself suggests a nature reasonably civilized, accustomed, almost of its own accord, to human traffic.
The "spectre-gray" in the second line might perhaps put us on alert, were it not for the run-of-the-mill alternation of tetrameters with trimeters, with their balladlike, folk-tune echo, which plays down the ghostliness of "spectre" to the point that we hear "spectrum" more than "spectre," and our mind wanders to the realm of colors rather than homeless souls. What we get out of this line is the sense of controlled melancholy, all the more so since it establishes the poem's meter. "Gray," sitting here in the rhyming position, releases, as it were, the two e's of "spectre" into a sort of exhaling sigh. What we hear is a wistful eih, which, together with the hyphen here, turns "shade" into a tint.
The next two lines, "And Winter's dregs made desolate/ The weakening eye of day," clinch, in the same breath, the quatrain pattern which is going to be sustained throughout this thirty-two-line poem and tell you, I am afraid, something about this poet's general view of humanity, or at least of its habitats. The distance between that weakening eye of day, which is presumably the sun, and those winter dregs makes the latter hug, as it were, the ground and take on "Winter' "s implied white or, as the case may be, gray color. I have the distinct feeling that our poet beholds here village dwellings, that we have here a view of a valley, harking back to the old trope of the human spectacle distressing the planets. The dregs, of course, are nothing but residue, what's left when the good stuff has been drunk out of the cup. On top of that, the "Winter's dregs" conjunction gives you a sense of a poet resolutely exiting Georgian diction and standing with both feet in the twentieth century.
Well, at least with one foot, as befits a poem written at the turn of the century. One of the additional pleasures of reading Hardy is observing the constant two-step of the contemporary (which is to say, traditional) and his own (which is to say, modern) diction. Rubbing these things against one another in a poem is how the future invades the present and, for that matter, the past to which the language has grown accustomed. In Hardy, this friction of stylistic tenses is palpable to the point of making you feel that he makes no meal of any, particularly his own, modern, stylistic mode. A really novel, breakthrough line can easily be followed by a succession of jobs so antiquated you may forget their antecedent altogether. Take, for instance, the second quatrain of the first stanza in "The Darkling Thrush":
The tangled bine-stems scored the sky
Like strings of broken lyres, And all mankind that haunted nigh Had sought their household fires.
The relatively advanced imagery of the first line (similar, in fact, to the opening passage in Frost's "Woodpile") quickly deteriorates here into a fin-de-siecle simile that even at the time of this poem's composition would have given off a stale air of pastiche. Why doesn't our poet strive here for fresher diction, why is he settling for obviously Victorian—even Wordsworthian—tropes, why doesn't he try to get ahead of his time—something he is clearly capable of?
First, because poetry is not a rat race yet. Second, because at the moment, the poem is at the stage of exposition.
The exposition of a poem is the most peculiar part, since at this point poets by and large don't know which way the poem will go. Hence, expositions tend to be long, with English poets especially, and in the nineteenth century in particular. On the whole, that side of the Atlantic they have a greater set of references, while over here we've got to look mainly after ourselves. Add to this the pure pleasure of verse writing, of working all sorts of echoes into your texture, and you'll realize that the notion of somebody being "ahead of his time," for all its complimentary ring, is essentially the benefit ofhindsight. In the second quatrain ofthe first stanza, Hardy is squarely behind his time, and he doesn't mind this in the least.
In fact, he loves it. The chief echo here is of the ballad, a term derived from ballare, to dance. This is one of the cornerstones of Hardy's poetics. Somebody should calculate the percentage of ballad-based meters in this poet's output; it may easily pass fifty. The explanation for this is not so much young Thomas Hardy's habit of playing the fiddle at country fairs as the English ballad's proclivity for gore and comeuppance, its inherent air of danse macabre. The chief attraction ofballad tunes is precisely their dancing—playful, if you insist—denomination, which proclaims from the threshold its artifice. A ballad—and, by extension, a ballad- based meter—announces to the reader: Look, I am not entirely for real; and poetry is too old an art not to use this opportunity for displaying self-awareness. So the prevalence of this sort of tune, in other words, simply coincides—"overlaps" is a better verb—in Hardy with the agnostic's world- view, justifying along the way an old turn of phrase ("haunted nigh") or a trite rhyme ("lyres'V'fires"), except that "lyres" should alert us to the self-referential aspect of the poem.
And as that aspect goes, the next stanza is full of it. It is a fusion of exposition and statement of theme. The end of a century is presented here as the death of a man lying, as it were, in state. To appreciate this treatment better, we have to bear in mind Thomas Hardy's other trade: that of ecclesiastical architect. In that respect, he undertakes here something quite remarkable when he puts the corpse of time into the church of the elements. What makes this undertaking congenial to him in the first place is the fact that the century's sixty years are his own. In a sense, he owns both the edifice and a large portion of its contents. This dual affinity stems not only from the given landscape at the given season but also from his practiced self-deprecation, all the more convincing in a sixty-year-old.