The Darkling Thrush

Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 1900

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Summary

Background

Poem Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Literary Devices

Form and Meter

“The Darkling Thrush” has four stanzas with eight lines each. Hardy composed the poem in the common meter traditional of ballads, which means the lines alternate between four-stresses (iambic tetrameter) and three-stresses each (iambic trimeter). These lines are called “iambic” because they are made up of iambs, a metrical foot which consists of one unstressed syllable followed by one stressed syllable.

A typical four-line unit in “The Darkling Thrush” scans like this (stressed syllables in bold):

The land's | sharp fea- | tures seemed | to me

The Cen- | tury's corpse | outleant,

Its crypt | the cloud- | y ca- | nopy,

The wind | its death- | lament.

The rhyme scheme is ABABCDCD; every other line of each four-line unit rhymes.

Hardy’s adherence to standard meter and rhyme is an important aspect of his poetic identity. Unlike experimental poets like Walt Whitman, for example, he does not bend or break traditional forms. Here, the poem’s hymn-like, musical qualities connect it both to birdsong and to religious ceremony (like the evensongs sung at Mass).

Sound

Hardy enhances the incantatory quality of “The Darkling Thrush” through clever manipulation of soundscape in the poem. He is especially fond of alliteration, a literary device in which a poet repeats consonant sounds for poetic effect. The first stanza, for example, is full of sluggish, gloomy “g” and “d” sounds (e.g., “gate” [Line 1], “spectre-grey” [Line 2], “dregs made desolate” [Line 3]). Hard “c” sounds, meanwhile, dominate the second stanza, evoking a funeral march or the strike of shovel hitting earth (e.g. “Century’s corpse” [Line10], “crypt the cloudy canopy” [Line 11]).

Hardy is also fond of sibilant sounds. Sibilance, sometimes referred to as sussuration, is a literary device which uses soft consonants to produce a hushed, hissing sound. Sibilance is especially associated with the “s” sound, but it can also be produced by sh, ch, th, and soft “c”s. Sibilance is common in “The Darkling Thrush”: See, for example, “[…] shrunken hard and dry, / And every spirit upon earth / Seemed fervourless as I” (Lines 14-16) and “So little cause for carolings / Of such ecstatic sound / Was written on terrestrial things” (Lines 25-27). As a complement to the plodding meter, sibilance lends an eerie, uncanny effect to the poem.

Diction

In poetry, diction refers to the words and syntax an author chooses to convey ideas and feelings in their poem. In this respect, Hardy did somewhat break from tradition; scholars note his creative and unusual use of language. Hardy was especially fond of “inventing” compound words, like “spectre-grey” (Line 2). Similarly, “outleant” (Line 10) and “blast-beruffled” (Line 22) can be described as nonce words, creative single-use inventions to suit the mood and meter of the poem.

Hardy is also highly aware of the literary past. Some of the more unusual words in the poem, like “darkling,” have rich literary associations (see the section on Literary Context).