The Darkling Thrush

Frost has turned the world spectre-grey, the winter light is failing, and every living thing has crept indoors to its fire. Thomas Hardy leans on a coppice gate at the dying edge of the nineteenth century and sees the whole age laid out like a corpse, the sky its crypt, the wind its death-lament. This is the great English pessimist at full strength, and the desolation is total, until it isn't. Out of the bleak twigs an old thrush, frail and gaunt and battered by the wind, flings its soul into the growing dark in a song of joy so unaccountable it stops the poem cold. Hardy does not pretend to understand it. He only registers that the bird seems to know some blessed Hope he himself cannot feel. Few poems hold despair and faith so honestly in the same trembling hand, or make you want, against all evidence, to believe the thrush.