As this poetry blog reaches its winter days, and as the weather becomes gloomier, let's look at a winter poem:
poem:
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.
analysis:
I chose to analyze this poem simply because of the fact the title sounds pretty cool. The Darkling Thrush. That title conjures up an image of a song bird flying through a ruined land. And that description is pretty accurate. What interested me was how the title sounds very mysterious and attention grabbing. This effect is achieved via the usage of the suffix -ling and the word "thrush", an archaic word for a songbird, with a loud song and brown breast. I also found this poem on a list of winter-themed poems, which further piqued my interest towards reading this poem.
And that interest was rightfully deserved, because The Darkling Thrush is one of the earliest pieces of dystopian writing, being written in 1900, decades before the genre would be a mainstay of young adult fiction. Although some may criticize me for using the term "dystopian", I feel like it is representative of the poem. The poem is split up into four stanzas of eight lines (except for the last stanza), and follows a ababcdcd rhyme scheme. The last four lines of the 3rd stanza stand out for me. It describes a songbird "flinging its soul upon the glowing gloom." I feel like this is a metaphor, representing a death in literature. Oscar Wilde died in November 1900, one month before The Darkling Thrush was published. That metaphor could also relate to the fact that literature wasn't going through any major movements at the time. Indeed, it would take another 15 years for modern poetry to advance further with the Dada movement. The last stanza also shines some more light onto the context of the poem. It calls the song of the thrush without cause, and the last four lines use apostrophe to refer to an absent person, God perhaps? And those lines state that God knew about the supposed disaster to occur, but the speaker wasn't aware. Possibly hinting at divine intervention ruining the planet?
I can go on about the evidence-based thoughts, but, I do hold personal connections to this piece. I spent four years in a gifted program. And the first year of it was hell. I couldn't make friends, I had horrible grades and the teacher had given up on me. I also gave up on myself. I felt like I was in a disaster zone, and I felt like the world was against me. How does this connect to the poem? Well, like the speaker, I felt like I was trudging through the dust of an inhospitable land. I was receiving praise for no apparent reason, like the song sung in the poem. However, I was unaware of the fact that he knew (the teachers in my case) about the disaster that I went through. I assumed that no one understood me. So I pushed away all the help that came to me. Only after I became aware of the teacher's intentions, those were, to give me a challenge to see if I could perform well did I succeed. In conclusion The Darkling Thrush is a great read if you want dystopian fiction that isn't meant for a 13 year old audience.
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