18 pages • 36 minutes read
The Darkling Thrush
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Symbols & Motifs
The coppice gate
While Hardy describes a varied scene with many visual elements in “The Darkling Thrush,” the speaker never moves from his starting place: a coppice gate, which he leans against in Line 1. As discussed in the Analysis section, “coppice” refers to a copse of trees. Thus, the scene involves the speaker standing on the edge of town, perhaps, looking out onto the wood.
“Copse” has obvious visual and aural similarities to “corpse,” signaling the predominance of death in Hardy’s narrative early in the poem. Gates—like doors, bridges, and crossroads—are also liminal places, meaning they represent a boundary between spaces. In myth and folklore, liminal spaces are dangerous. Supernatural manifestations are especially likely in transitional areas, as supernatural beings are themselves liminal, somewhere between dead and alive. Thus, Hardy’s innocuous “coppice” (Line 1) gate carries a distinct tone of dread.
Metaphorically, Hardy himself also stands at the “gate” (Line 1) between the 19th century and the 20th in writing “The Darkling Thrush.” He supposedly composed the poem on New Year’s Eve, the “gate” (Line 1) from one year to the next. The gate works on many metaphorical levels to symbolize transition: from civilization to wilderness, from Romanticism to Modernism, from one year to the next and, indeed, from one century to the next.
The thrush
The poem’s title, “The Darkling Thrush,” signals the importance of the poem’s avian character. Birds were a popular subject for the 19th century Romantics, often symbolizing the visionary and restorative power of poetry. Many Romantic poets, from William Wordsworth to John Keats to Matthew Arnold, wrote poems wherein birdsong lifts a despondent speaker’s spirits. Emily Dickinson explicitly connects birds to hope in her 1891 poem “‘Hope’ is the thing with feathers.”
Hardy may have had the American poet Walt Whitman in mind when he chose the thrush for his poem. In Whitman’s “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d” (1865), a eulogy for President Abraham Lincoln, a hidden thrush sings in a swamp in similarly funereal circumstances. Alternatively, Hardy may have chosen a thrush for more mundane, ornithological reasons: Thrushes are unusually active in winter. The image of an elderly little bird resolutely singing in even the darkest of times may have spoken to the poet. Hardy was himself an older man at the time of the poem’s composition, and he suffered from ill health for most of his life.
It is unclear whether Hardy intended the thrush as an inspiring or bleak figure. Like the seeds of Lines 13 and 14—which are usually symbols of potential, but here are hard and dry—so the bird is “aged” (Line21), perhaps unlikely to survive the winter. The bird’s determination to sing may reflect pathetic mindlessness rather than determined optimism. Such an interpretation would render the poem an ironic twist on more positive examples of the motif, like Keats’s “Ode to a Nightingale.”
The broken lyre
The lyre is a particularly useful symbol of Western civilization’s earlier, happier days. A stringed instrument resembling a harp, the lyre is the accessory of Apollo, Greek god of music and the arts. It thereafter became associated with poets and creatives in general; “lyric” poetry is etymologically related to “lyre.”
That Hardy’s lyres are broken (Line 6) suggests poetic sterility in the Victorian age. The poem’s frigid landscape is a space without sound—the speaker himself never audibly speaks. The only other sound (and only other being) is a bird, who chooses to sing when it is, perhaps, inappropriate to celebrate.
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Related Titles
By Thomas Hardy
