U.S. Classes: "The Darkling Thrush"

Campus is so quiet and beautiful during the summer. It's strange to eat in a cafeteria that is mostly empty, sit in class buildings full of empty halls and unused rooms, and stand in an English department empty of professors. It was bizarre to visit the library today and not see students camped out at the inumerable study carrels, brows furrowed over heavy textbooks. Perhaps the oddest thing is the total lack of commitments this week: all I have to do is show up to meals and class. No work, no small group, no floor events, no evangelism team, no harp studio or symphonic band rehearsals. I'm having a difficult time believing that I actually have to do homework. Granted, the reading is so delightful, it's difficult to think of it as work.


I'd like to share a poem I was particularly impressed by. We discussed it a bit in Modern British today, and although I already loved it when I read it before class, my professor's insights made it especially powerful. It's called "The Darkling Thrush," by Thomas Hardy, a profoundly depressing novelist. His poems tend to contain at least a dream of hope, and it's that desire, that glimmer of meaning that makes this poem so beautiful. Notice how the first two stanzas contain depressing language of deadness, cold, and emptiness, while the last two emphasize more positive, even religious words: carol, evensong, Hope, joy illimited. What a masterful piece of work!

"I leant upon a coppice gate
When Frost was spectre-gray,
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."