The Darkling Thrush

The Romantic movement is central to interpreting Hardy’s novels and poems. Romanticism here refers to a literary movement of the late 1700s and 1800s that focused on the emotional life of the individual and curiosity about the self. Scholars generally credit the English poets Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834) and William Wordsworth (1770-1850) as the first Romantic writers (Wordsworth was a particularly important influence on Hardy).

In a pushback against the rationalism and reductive order imposed by the Enlightenment, the Romantics zeroed in on authentic personal experiences. They rejected industrialization and urged a return to nature, championing a sense of responsibility to one’s fellow humankind over capitalistic exploitation. The English Romantics of the early 1800s were particularly interested in idealizing a pastoral lifestyle over life in the city. The second generation of Romantic luminaries like John Keats (1795-1821) and Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822) idealized the untamed wilds and the everyday person while weaving in classic Romantic themes like solitude, melancholy, and individual experience.

In “The Darkling Thrush,” Hardy makes clear his debt to these writers while also nuancing their optimism with a more modern, hard bit realism. The poem’s title, for example, consciously links it to a long literary tradition. The adjective “darkling,” which simply means “in the dark,” finds its earliest uses in the mid-15th century. One of the first great English epicists, John Milton, linked the word to birds in Book III of his 1667 poem Paradise Lost, where “the wakeful Bird / Sings darkling, and in shadiest Covert hid / Tunes her nocturnal Note” (Book III, ll. 38-40). The Romantic poet John Keats then famously used “darkling” in one of his most beloved poems, “Ode to a Nightingale” (1819), which also features a despairing speaker’s inspiration by a singing bird. This scenario was a common Romantic motif. William Wordsworth, too, wrote a poem whose speaker enjoys birdsong as a hopeful signifier of better days, both in the past and the future (“To The Cuckoo,” 1807 and “To A Skylark,” 1825).

While Hardy shows clear influence from the Romantics, he also rejects many of their primary tenets. Even among his fellow Romantics, who are noted for their melancholic tendencies, Hardy is particularly morbid and pessimistic. He is also much more ambivalent than his predecessors were about nature. In “The Darkling Thrush,” for example, the barren landscape is just as uninviting as the city. Hardy’s works are defined by a pervasive sense of alienation—of feeling unmoored, lost at sea, and home nowhere. Like the speaker in “Thrush,” Hardy paused at the gate between idealized Romantic forests and modern industrialized cities, and he found neither particularly appealing. Hardy intimately understood the flaws in traditional agricultural society—as his novels reveal—but also criticized the horrors of the industrial age and humankind’s new technological capacity for cruelty. As the speaker in “Thrush” suggests, Hardy seemed to find little worth in celebrating human life at all (Lines 25-8). In this sense, he was an important influence on Modernist thinkers and writers in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Rattled by the horrors of World War I and industrialization, Modernism focused on similar topics, like breaking with tradition, feeling alone and pessimistic about humanity, and acknowledging the relativity of truth.