Follow Friday

Q: Activity: Spine Poetry. Create a line of poetry with your book spines (take a picture). Not feeling creative? Tell us about your favorite poem.

My favorite poem is "The Darkling Thrush" by Thomas Hardy. It is a poem about a man who is walking through a winter scene both externally and internally and hears a thrush singing in a tree. He asks himself what the bird could possibly be singing about with such joy when everything is so bleak.
I fell in love with it when I first read it, mainly because through my many bouts of depression, I've felt the same thing.

This is the poem:


  The Darkling Thrush by Thomas Hardy

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.