The ancient pulse of germ and birth
Was shrunken hard and dry, And every spirit upon earth Seemed fervourless as I.
That he had some twenty-eight years to go (in the course of which, at the age of seventy-four, he remarried) is of no consequence, as he couldn't be aware of such a prospect. An inquisitive eye may even zero in on "shrunken" and perceive a euphemistic job in that "pulse of germ and birth." That would be both reductive and irrelevant, however, since the mental gesture of this quatrain is far grander and more resolute than any personal lament. It ends with "I," and the gaping caesura after "fervourless" gives this "as I" terrific singularity.
Now the exposition is over, and had the poem stopped here, we'd still have a good piece, the kind of sketch from nature with which the body of many a poet's work swells. For many poems, specifically those that have nature as their subject, are essentially extended expositions fallen short of their objective; sidetracked, as it were, by the pleasure of the attained texture.
Nothing of the sort ever happens in Hardy. He seems always to know what he is after, and pleasure for him is neither a principle nor a valid consideration in verse. He is not big on sonority and orchestrates his lines rather poorly, until it comes to the punch line of the poem, or to the main point the poem is trying to score. That's why his expositions are not particularly mellifluous; if they are—as is the case in "The Darkling Thrush"—it is more by fluke than by intent. With Hardy, the main adventure of a poem is always toward its end. By and large, he gives you the impression that verse for him is but the means of transportation, justified and perhaps even hallowed only by the poem's destination. His ear is seldom better'than his eye, but both are inferior to his mind, which subordinates them to its purposes, at times harshly.
So what we've got by now is a picture of utter desolation, of a man and a landscape locked in their respective mori- bundity. The next stanza offers a key:
At once a voice arose among The bleak twigs overhead In a full-hearted evensong Of joy illimited;
An aged thrush, frail, gaunt, and small
In blast-beruffled plume Has chosen thus to fling his soul Upon the growing gloom.
This is a treasure trove of a stanza for anyone interested in Hardy. Let's take its story line at face value and see what our poet is up to. He is up to showing you an exit out of the previous stanza's dead end. Dead ends can be exited only upward or by backing out. "Arose" and "overhead" tell you the route our poet chooses. He goes for a full-scale elevation here; in fact, for an epiphany, for a complete takeoff with clear-cut ecclesiastical connotations. But what is remarkable about this takeoff is the self-consciousness accompanying the lyrical release of "In a full-hearted evensong/Of joy illim- ited." This self-consciousness is apparent in the dactylic undercutting you detect in both "evensong" and "illimited": these words come to you prefaced by a caesura and as though exhaled; as though these lines that begin as assertions dissipate in his throat into qualifiers.
This reflects not so much the understandable difficulty an agnostic may have with ecclesiastical vocabulary as Hardy's true humility. In other words, the takeoff of belief is checked here by the gravity of the speaker's reservations as to his right to use these means of elevation. "An aged thrush, frail, gaunt, and small,/In blast-beruffled plume" is, of course, Hardy's self-portrait. Famous for his aquiline profile, with a tuft of hair hovering above his bald pate, he had indeed a birdlike appearance—in his old age especially, judging by the available photographs. ("Gaunt" is his pet word, a signature really, if only because it is so un- Georgian.)
At any rate, the bird here, in addition to behaving like a bard, has his visual characteristics also. This is our poet's ticket into its sentiments, which yields one of the greatest lines in English poetry of the twentieth century.
It turns out that an aged thrush of not particularly fetching appearance
Had chosen thus to fling his soul Upon the growing gloom.
Speaking of choices, "fling" can't be beaten here. Given the implied visual similarity between bird and bard, this two- liner bespeaking a posture toward reality of the one does the same for another. And if one had to define the philosophy underlying this posture, one would end up no doubt oscillating madly between epicurianism and stoicism. Blissfully, for us terminology is not the most pressing issue. Far more pressing is the need to absorb this two-liner into our system, say, for the dark time of the year.
Had the poem stopped here, we would have an extraordinary piece of moral instruction; they are few and far between in poetry but they still do exist. Besides, the superiority ofthe animal kingdom (birds in particular) in poetry is taken for granted. In fact, the notion of that superiority is one of poetry's most distinctive trappings. What is quite remarkable about "The Darkling Thrush" is that the poet goes practically against this notion, which he himself has bought and is trying to resell in the process of the poem. What's more, by doing this, he almost goes against his most successful lines ever. What is he hoping for? What is he driven by?
Hard to tell, except that perhaps he does not recognize his own success, and what blinds him to it is his metaphysical appetite. Another explanation for why he goes for the fourth stanza here is that appetite's close relative: the sense of symmetry. Those who write formal verse will always prefer four eight-line stanzas to three, and we shouldn't forget the ecclesiastical architect in Hardy. Quatrains could be likened to euphonic building blocks. As such they tend to generate an order that is most satisfactory when it can be divided by four. The sixteen-line exposition naturally—for our poet's mind, ear, and eye—calls for at minimum the same number of lines for the rest.
To put it less idiosyncratically, the stanzaic pattern employed in a poem determines its length as much as—if not more than—its story line. "So little cause for carolings/Of such ecstatic sound" is no less a denouement than the euphonic imperative created by the preceding twenty-four lines, requiring resolution. A poem's length, in other words, is its breath. The first stanza inhales, the second exhales, the third stanza inhales . . . Guess what you need a fourth stanza for? To complete the cycle.
Remember that this is a poem about looking into the future. As such, it has to be balanced. Our man, poet though he is, is not a utopian; nor can he permit himself the posture of a prophet, or that of a visionary. The subject itself, by definition, is too pregnant with imprecision; so what's required of the poet here is sobriety, regardless of whether he is pessimistic or optimistic by temperament. Hence the absolutely remarkable linguistic content of the fourth stanza, with its fusion of legalese ("cause . . . Was written") with modernist detachment ("on terrestrial things") and the quaintly archaic ("Afar or nigh around").
"So little cause for carolings/Of such ecstatic sound/Was written on terrestrial things" betrays not so much the unique bloody-mindedness of our poet as his impartiality to any level of diction he resorts to in a poem. There is something fright- eningly democratic in Hardy's whole approach to poetics, and it can be summed up as "so long as it works."
Note the elegiac opening of this stanza, all the more poignant in tone because of the "growing gloom" a line before. The pitch is still climbing up, we are still after an elevation, after an exit from our cul-de-sac. "So little cause" [caesura] "for carolings/Ofsuch ecstatic"—caesura—"sound . . ." "Ecstatic" carries an exclamation, and so, after the caesura, does "sound."