The Darkling Thrush

'Ode to a Nightingale' by John Keats (1819)

While John Milton first connected the word “darkling” to birds in Paradise Lost, it was John Keats who made it famous in his “Ode to a Nightingale.” Comparing “Ode to a Nightingale” to “The Darkling Thrush” illuminates the divergence between Keats’s Romantic worldview and Hardy’s more Modernist approach. While Keats’s nightingale seems almost supernatural in its power and beauty, Hardy’s thrush is a grubby, scrawny thing, perhaps reflecting Hardy’s more sober realism.

"To A Skylark" by William Wordsworth (1825)

William Wordsworth, an important influence on Hardy, addresses his poem’s title bird, the skylark, directly. He ascribes an almost divine quality to the bird, linking the beauty of God’s creation—nature—with His divinity itself. In “The Darkling Thrush,” Hardy takes some of the shine off of these Romantic (and religious) interpretations of the natural world.

"Dover Beach" by Matthew Arnold (1867)

In “Dover Beach,” Hardy’s contemporary Matthew Arnold also uses poetry to reckon with alienation and loss of faith against the tide of scientific progress. Like “The Darkling Thrush,” these sorts of elegies mourning the passing of a historical era were a popular genre for the Victorians.