.: July 2010

Saturday, 31 July 2010

The Darkling Thrush

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.

Another in a similar tone to The Impercipient. Here there's also a slight at the recently past Romantics and their pretty ideologies.

The Impercipient

THAT from this bright believing band
An outcast I should be,
That faiths by which my comrades stand
Seem fantasies to me,
And mirage-mists their Shining Land,	5
Is a drear destiny.

Why thus my soul should be consigned
To infelicity,
Why always I must feel as blind
To sights my brethren see,	10
Why joys they’ve found I cannot find,
Abides a mystery.

Since heart of mine knows not that ease
Which they know; since it be
That He who breathes All’s Well to these	15
Breathes no All’s Well to me,
My lack might move their sympathies
And Christian charity!

I am like a gazer who should mark
An inland company	20
Standing upfingered, with, “Hark! hark!
The glorious distant sea!”
And feel, “Alas, ’tis but yon dark
And wind-swept pine to me!”

Yet I would bear my shortcomings	25
With meet tranquillity,
But for the charge that blessed things
I’d liefer have unbe.

O, doth a bird deprived of wings
Go earth-bound wilfully! . . . .	30
Enough. As yet disquiet clings
About us. Rest shall we.

Thomas Hardy's poems of dissilusionment and strain to believe and feel religion / spitiuality have some resonance, I think, with the subject of our existence.

It's funny that the title of the poem is The Impercipient, meaning imperceptive suggesting that he is the one who is not perceptive to the notions and presence of spirituality or religion, that he is missing something in the world. He seems to perceive the holes in religious rational as his failing.

It's as if he is pondering the possibility of following along with these believers in spite of his missgivings, he at least questions whether that's possible.

He sounds very modern for his time to me, in touch with the possibilities of our universe and existence but unaware of what that means and ambivalent.

Anyway I get the feeling of his lost-ness, the scenario of someone aware of a massive unknown, it's almost as if his sense of confusion and lost-ness is doubled by not only being lost by his own missgivings but also by feeling to be an "outcast" amongst his comrades.