One of Hopkins’s ‘Terrible Sonnets’, this poem is one of the finest evocations of a sleepless night that English poetry has produced. This night! what sights you, heart, saw ways you went!Īnd more must, in yet longer light’s delay … What hours, O what black hours we have spent I wake and feel the fell of dark, not day. Gerard Manley Hopkins, ‘ I wake and feel the fell of dark, not day’. (Such a religiously inflected analysis of Hardy’s poem is reinforced by ‘carolings’ in the next stanza.)Ħ. In the third stanza, when the thrush of the title appears (‘darkling’ is an old poetic word for ‘in darkness’ – it also, incidentally, echoes Matthew Arnold‘s use of the word in his famous poem about declining faith, ‘Dover Beach’, published in 1867), its song is described as ‘evensong’, suggesting the church service, while the use of the word ‘soul’ also suggests the spiritual. In ‘The Darkling Thrush’ itself we are given clues that religion is on the speaker’s mind. Hardy hears a thrush singing, and wonders whether the thrush is aware of some reason to be hopeful for the coming new year, some reason of which Hardy himself is unaware. This classic Hardy poem captures the mood of a winter evening as the sun, ‘the weakening eye of day’, sets below the horizon and gives way to dusk on New Year’s Eve.
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