Dear Readers, Thomas Hardy is rather out of fashion these days, but in mitigation I’d like to offer this, which I think captures the moment when a song thrush sings on a winter day better than anything I’ve ever read. And it’s hopeful, and goodness knows we could all do with a bit of that.
The Darkling Thrush
By Thomas Hardy
I leant upon a coppice gate
When Frost was spectre-grey,
And Winter’s dregs made desolate
The weakening eye of day.
The tangled bine-stems scored the sky
Like strings of broken lyres,
And all mankind that haunted nigh
Had sought their household fires.
The land’s sharp features seemed to be
The Century’s corpse outleant,
His crypt the cloudy canopy,
The wind his death-lament.
The ancient pulse of germ and birth
Was shrunken hard and dry,
And every spirit upon earth
Seemed fervourless as I.
At once a voice arose among
The bleak twigs overhead
In a full-hearted evensong
Of joy illimited;
An aged thrush, frail, gaunt, and small,
In blast-beruffled plume,
Had chosen thus to fling his soul
Upon the growing gloom.
So little cause for carolings
Of such ecstatic sound
Was written on terrestrial things
Afar or nigh around,
That I could think there trembled through
His happy good-night air
Some blessed Hope, whereof he knew
And I was unaware.
I wonder if this is about a Mistle Thrush (or even a Blackbird) both of which start singing in December. The reference to the wind’s lament suggests the stormy conditions that Mistle Thrushes seem to prefer. Song Thrushes do sometimes sing in mid-winter, but they usually wait until March where I live (and now only in the nearby wood due to dastardly cats). And, if you’ll forgive the rant, I’m not sure that Hardy’s out of fashion either, at least novel wise. He’s being dramatised on Radio 4 again at the moment (a repeated series from 2020) and the misery of Tess of the D’Urbs gets dramatised on TV at least once a decade. I worry that there is no shortage of other excellent and contemporary authors whose works could be shared more widely through dramatisation, but I can’t help feeling that our endless obsession with Hardy, the Brontës, Elliot, Dickens etc is because it’s cheap – there are no royalties to pay – and it appeals to our national tendency to wallow in the past!
Could well be a mistle thrush, Trevor – they were known as storm cocks, after all…and you could also be right about the cheapness of all those ‘classic’ authors.