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The Darkling Thrush

from A Rose From My Mother's Garden by Ruth Cooke

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about

This oft-anthologised poem by Thomas Hardy was originally titled “By the Century’s Deathbed, 1900” and was published on 29 Dec 1900 in The Graphic, a British illustrated newspaper. Hardy chose a form that-- almost exactly a century earlier-- Wordsworth and his Romantic contemporaries had bequeathed to the nineteenth century: the literary ballad. The wonderful and deliberately archaic word “darkling” (meaning growing dark or characterised by darkness) already had a substantial footprint in the history of poetry, and his use of it conjures its use by Romantic poets such as Keats, Cowper, and Wordsworth.

lyrics

Lyrics

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 on this earth
Seemed fervourless as I.

Then all at once a voice arose among
The bleak twigs overhead
In a full-hearted evensong
Of joy illimited;
An aging thrush, frail, gaunt, and small,
In blast-beruffled plume,
Had chosen thus to fl ing 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.

credits

from A Rose From My Mother's Garden, released October 12, 2019
Poem by Thomas Hardy, tune Ruth Cooke

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Ruth Cooke UK

Wbsite: www.ruthcooke.com
Ruth has been writing and performing songs for many years now but has mostly been too busy living to record anything!
She is mostly to be found at folk clubs and festivals or at small gatherings and round campfires - although she wouldn’t say no to a small stadium!
She loves singarounds wherever they may be and is a regular floor singer at Lewes Saturday Folk Club. ... more

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