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The sly double-dealing at work in Thomas Hardy's "The Darkling Thrush" has been noted for decades: Hardy's economical, image-rich setting of the scene (the "spectre-gray" Frost, the leafless vine-stems, the people who do not live in but rather "haunt" the neighborhood) as representation of his philosophy, laid against the "full-hearted evensong / Of Joy illimited" offered up by the aged thrush. But Hardy, at the top of his game as he is here, is never simple enough to allow for an easy dichotomy of conscious man against unconscious or instinctual beast. Instead he grants the bird consciousness and has him "fling(ing) his soul / Upon the growing gloom," a maneuver by which Hardy forces the bird to experience the desolation Hardy is describing, even though the bird chooses to greet it stoically. Thus the bird's determination actually reinforces Hardy's morose observations of the physical world, an image of the nineteenth century's "corpse outleant."
 Then Hardy nimbly sidesteps the reader's expectation by moving out of the physical scene he has so specifically created and into the bird's awareness: Hardy sees such a division between the apparently dead natural world and the obvious delight of the birdsong that he hypothesizes a "blessed Hope" the thrush, but not Hardy himself, knows. Conventionally, then, the poem is a meditation by which the poet, avowedly the glum realist, admits of the possibility of a joy he cannot sense. But is this an adequate interpretation? After all, what Hardy allows the thrush is only hope, not certainty, and furthermore, while Hardy willingly accedes consciousness to the bird, the reader need not. The reader may choose to read the "lift" at the end of the poem as simply a deception by which Hardy makes his life more bearable and return to the third stanza, in which even the bird confronts gloom, singing only because that is what birds do.
But Hardy has been slyer yet, because the heart of the poem is not the thrush's song, or putative courage, or putative optimistic wisdom: the heart of the poem is the landscape Hardy so carefully depicts in stanzas one and two, the scene from which the thrush's song erupts and which Hardy carefully dates, as if the image of the century's corpse was not date enough, to "December 1900". This is important not simply because it recasts the entire poem as, arguably, no more than a depressing New Year's Eve fancy, but rather because it makes the scene itself an appearance rather than a reality. If the opening stanza was not sufficiently grim, Hardy assiduously editorializes in the second that "The ancient pulse of germ and birth / Was shrunken hard and dry, / And every spirit upon earth / Seemed fervourless as I." Seemed of course is a key word -- an "appearance" word -- but not the key thought, which is the scene itself. Why is everything so grim? Because the world is a blasted hell incapable of providing happiness? No, because it is winter. If Hardy had really intended "The Darkling Thrush", at least in its first two stanzas, as a portrait of a pessimistic psyche, he could not have included the lines about germ and birth because they are obvious deceits, as it were -- not an insightful study of the nature of the universe but an unmistakeable pointer to the cycle of the seasons, in which the gloom of winter is always relieved by the germ and birth of spring.
So what then is the "message" of "The Darkling Thrush"? If it is anything beyond the skillful and effective depiction of a temporary state of mind, it will take a far cleverer reader than I to ferret it out. And, interestingly, the poem -- in its original context -- receives commentary by Hardy himself.
I must admit to having made the remark that "no one deserves a collected poems," but some few poets -- and they are few -- deserve to have their poems read (if only once in the case of most of the poems) in their original collections, in the original order. Hardy is one of those poets. "The Darkling Thrush", originally collected in Poems of the Past and the Present (1901), is preceded by a handful of poems dealing with birds or winter or both, the first of which is "The Caged Thrush Freed and Home Again." In this villanelle, the newly freed thrush is eager to tell his always wild friends that "Men know but little more than we. . . . / How happy days are made to be." Once again the thrush is given consciousness, and again he is part of a meditation on happiness. As the quoted lines indicate, "The Caged Thrush" is a much simpler poem than its more famous (and deservedly so) partner. Men, the thrush observes,
cannot changed the Frost's decree,
They cannot keep the skies serene;
How happy days are made to be
Eludes great Man's sagacity
No less than ours--
Here even the thrush is baffled by the search for happiness, and yet, and yet -- How musical and cheerful, how chirpy (one might be forgiven for saying) is the tone of the thrush's speech. And more telling still is the extremely ambiguous syntax of the essential line "How happy days are made to be." The surface meaning is simple -- men, no more than thrushes, know how to make happy days. But the underlying meaning is almost the exact opposite -- days are made (or meant) to be happy, though neither man nor thrush fully understands the degree to which that is true. Whatever option one takes, however, the import is the same -- days can be made happy. This suggestion foreshadows the joy of the darkling thrush a few pages later.
In between the two thrushes are four poems, three of which are triolets. In all three, birds take note of the changes in their surroundings: in two, they mourn the lack of food that winter brings; in the third, game-birds are confused that the men who once fed them are now hunting them. This third is an example of what Hardy would later call a "satire of circumstance", and it is worth pointing out that the cruelty here is the deliberate work of men, not that of nature, a condition also true of many of Hardy's poems about people.
The fourth poem, which immediately precedes "The Darkling Thrush", would seem at first to break the sequence: "The Last Chrysanthemum." Yet this poem too mourns the dying of the year, "When flowers are in their tombs," and the last chrysanthemum itself is something of an anomaly, like the darkling thrush. Hardy (or his narrator) wonders why this lone flower, through all the warm summer, chose not to open and shows its beauty only now, when "The season's shine is spent." Did the flower think that "Winter would stay its stress" for it? But Hardy ends by drawing back, expressly denying the flower the consciousness he has given all these birds, and concludes--
I talk as if the thing were born
With sense to work its mind;
Yet it is but one mask of many worn
By the great Face behind.
What is perhaps most appealing about this stanza is not the mask Hardy puts upon the flower but the mask he removes. Rather than lurking behind the thoughts of birds, as do the preceding poems, or casting himself as an agnostic who cannot know anything about a non-material life, here he offers a direct statement of philosophy: nature's various aspects are masks by which "The great Face" hides, or presents, itself. Positing this presumably non-material force, Hardy then leaves the reader to puzzle out Its intent, what it might seem to mean that the Face shows itself as a flower blossoming when all should be dead. Is the chrysanthemum then an equivalent image to the thrush's joy-filled song, an indication that, despite the bleakness all about, something else is going on? Or is it only an emblem of the greater desolation, since its late appearance guarantees a sudden death?
These are questions that seem to find answers in the larger body of Hardy's work, both poetry and prose, in which event, history, and nature all apparently work against any persistent happiness. On the other hand, Hardy's work is also filled with characters -- human and otherwise -- who remain unbowed, who find joy in small events and guarded moments, or who are perhaps insufficiently "intelligent" to know that they ought to be morose, like the freed thrush who sings so happily of circumstantial unhappiness.
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