Vocally, this is the highest point in the stanza; even "whereof he knew/And I was unaware" is several notes— notches—lower. And yet even at this highest point, the poet, we realize, holds his voice in check, because "carolings/Of such ecstatic sound" are what "a full-hearted evensong" comes down to; which is to say, the evaluation of the bird's voice has undergone a demotion, with ecclesiastical diction being supplanted, as it were, by lay parlance. And then comes this terrific "Was written on terrestrial things," whose detachment from any particularity bespeaks presumably the vantage point either of the "weakening eye of day" or, to say the least, of the bird itself, and that's why we have the archaic—which is to say, impersonal—"Afar or nigh around."
The unparticularity and impersonality, however, belong to neither, -but rather to their fusion, the crucible being the poet's mind or, if you will, the language itself. Let's dwell on this extraordinary line—"Was written on terrestrial things"—a bit longer, for it crept into this turn-of-the- century poem out of where no poet had ever been before.
The conjunction "terrestrial things" suggests a detachment whose nature is not exactly human. The point of view attained here through the proximity of two abstract notions is, strictly speaking, inanimate. The only evidence of human manufacture is that it is indeed being "written"; and it gives you a sense that language is capable of arrangements that reduce a human being to, at best, the function of a scribe. That it is language that utilizes a human being, not the other way around. That language flows into the human domain from the realm of nonhuman truths and dependencies, that it is ultimately the voice ofinanimate matter, and that poetry just registers now and then its ripple effect.
I am far from suggesting that this is what Thomas Hardy was after in this line. Rather, it was what this line was after in Thomas Hardy, and he responded. And as though he was somewhat perplexed by what escaped from under his pen, he tried to domesticate it by resorting to familiarly Victorian diction in "Afar or nigh around." Yet the diction of this conjunction was destined to become the diction of twentieth- century poetry, more and more. It is only two or three decades from "terrestrial things" to Auden's "necessary murder" and "artificial wilderness." For its "terrestrial things" line alone, "The Darkling Thrush" is a turn-of-the-century poem.
And the fact that Hardy responded to the inanimate voice of this conjunction had to do obviously with his being well prepared to heed this sort of thing, not only by his agnosticism (which might be enough), but by practically any poem's vector upward, by its gravitation toward epiphany. In principle, a poem goes down the page as much as it goes up in spirit, and ''The Darkling Thrush" adheres to this principle closely. On this course, irrationality is not an obstacle, and the ballad's tetrameters and trimeters bespeak a considerable familiarity with irrationality:
That I could think there trembled through
His happy good-night air Some blessed Hope, whereof he knew And I was unaware.
What brings our author to this "blessed Hope" is above all the centrifugal momentum developed by the amassment of thirty alternating tetrameters and trimeters, requiring either vocal or mental resolution, or both. In this sense, this turn- of-the-century poem is very much about itself, about its composition which—by happy coincidence—gravitates toward its finale the way the century does. A poem, in fact, offers a century its own, not necessarily rational, version of the future, thereby making the century possible. Against all odds, against the absence of "cause."
And the century—which is soon to be over—has gallantly paid this poem back, as we see in this classroom. In any case, as prophecies go, "The Darkling Thrush" has proved to be more sober and accurate than, let's say, "The Second Coming," by W. B. Yeats. A thrush proved a more reliable source than a falcon; perhaps because this thrush showed up for Mr. Hardy some twenty years earlier. Perhaps because monotony is more in tune with time's own idiom than a shriek.
So if "The Darkling Thrush" is a poem about nature, it is so only by half, since both bard and bird are that nature's effects, and only one of them is, to put it coarsely, hopeful. It is, rathet, a poem about two perceptions of the same reality, and as such it is clearly a philosophical lyric. There is no hierarchy here between hope and hopelessness, distributed in the poem with notable evenhandedness—cer- tainly not between their carriers, as our thrush, I am tempted to point out, is not "aged" for nothing. It's been around, and its "blessed Hope" is as valid as the absence thereof. The last line's caesura isolating "unaware" is eloquent enough to muffle out regret and bring to the last word an air ofassertion. After all, the "blessed Hope" is that for the future; that's why the last word here is spoken by reason.
v
Twelve years later—but still before the Irish bard's beast set out for Bethlehem—the British passenger liner Titanic sank on her maiden voyage in the mid-Atlantic after colliding with an iceberg. Over 1,500 lives were lost. That was presumably the first of many disasters the century ushered in by Thomas Hardy's thrush became famous for.
"The Convergence of the Twain" was written barely two weeks after the catastrophe; it was published shortly afterward, on May 14. The Titanic was lost on April 14. In other words, the raging controversy over the cause of the disaster, the court case against the company, the shocking survivors' accounts, etc.—all those things were still ahead at the time of this poem's composition. The poem thus amounts to a visceral response on the part of our poet; what's more, the first time it was printed, it was accompanied by a headnote saying "Improvised on the Loss of the Titanic."
So, what chord did this disaster strike in Mr. Hardy? "The Convergence of the Twain" is habitually billed by the critical profession either as the poet's condemnation of modern man's self-delusion of technological omnipotence or as the song of his vainglory's and excessive luxury's comeuppance. To be sure, the poem is both. The Titanic itself was a marvel of both modern shipbuilding and ostentatiousness. However, no less than in the ship, our poet seems to be interested in the iceberg. And it is the iceberg's generic— triangular—shape that informs the poem's stanzaic design. So does "A Shape of Ice" 's inanimate nature vis-a-vis the poem's content.
At the same time, it should be noted, the triangular shape suggests the ship: by alluding to the standard representation of a sail. Also, given our poet's architectural past, this shape could connote for him an ecclesiastical edifice or a pyramid. (After all, every tragedy presents a riddle.) In verse, the foundation of such a pyramid would be hexameter, whose caesura divides its six feet into even threes: practically the longest meter available, and one Mr. Hardy was particularly fond of, perhaps because he taught himself Greek.
Although his fondness for figurative verse (which comes to us from Greek poetry of the Alexandrian period) shouldn't be overstated, his enterprise with stanzaic patterns was great enough to make him sufficiently self-conscious about the visual dimension of his poems to make such a move. In any case, the stanzaic design of"The Convergence of the Twain" is clearly deliberate, as two trimeters and one hexameter (normally conveyed in English precisely by two trimeters— also the convergence of a twain) show, held together by the triple rhyme.
i
In a solitude of the sea Deep from human vanity, And the Pride of Life that planned her, stilly couches she.
II
Steel chambers, late the pyres Of her salamandrine fires, Cold currents thrid, and turn to rhythmic tidal lyres.
I I I
Over the mirrors meant To glass the opulent The sea-worm crawls—grotesque, slimed, dumb, indifferent.