Poetry and Animals

134THE INDIVIDUAL ANIMAL IN POETRY

as the ultimate existential threat. Observation of the animal has made
the poet most profoundly aware of this threat and produces the desire in
the speaker to form an articulation of loss (as immortal poetry) that
might stand against oblivion.
Written at the end of the year 1900, Thomas Hardy’s poem “The Dark-
ling Thrush” is also a meditation centered on an encounter with an indi-
vidual bird, “an aged thrush, frail, gaunt, and small, / In blast-beruffled
plume.”^23 Although the poem is symbolically freighted, beginning and
ending with evocations of the tragedy of the human condition, the
poem’s climactic lyric moment centers on animal encounter. The speaker
is in an explicitly symbolic pastoral landscape—the bleakness of the
cold and grey winter day suggesting that the end of the nineteenth cen-
tury signifies death and decline rather than rebirth.

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.

Interrupting the landscape and the speaker, the aged thrush sings its
“full-hearted evensong / of joy illimited.” The bird and its song are
also explicitly symbolic—of “some blessed hope” in the face of “growing
gloom.” As in Coleridge’s “The Nightingale” and Keats’s ode (to which
the poem explicitly alludes), the speaker here insists that the thrush
song must be one of joy, in spite of the seemingly melancholic appear-
ance of landscape and sky. Indeed, it is surprising that the song of a bird
can have so much symbolic power here. Only in poetry, one might think,
can a single birdsong interrupt not just the despair of the poem’s human
speaker but also the decline of human civilization. What gives the song
such power? Here it is not the abstract quality of birdsong (which in
Keats’s ode rises above history because it always exists and thus has the