Hope For an Answer Some Day: The Thrush’s Song

Thomas Hardy’s brilliantly composed poem, “The Darkling Thrush,” explores a speaker’s view of a dark, hopeless world that is illuminated by the sweet song of a bird. Despite the harsh outlook that Hardy sets out to make in his poem, there is, for some reason, this thrush that has reason to sing. Hardy starts by illustrating the speaker’s whereabouts:

I lent upon a coppice gate

When Frost was spectre-grey

And Winter’s dregs made desolate

The weakening eye of day. (1-4)

Hardy uses words like “desolate” and “weakening” to describe the surroundings. This rather harsh vocabulary sets a mood that is rather dark and bleak; a land without much hope for the inhabitants. The next four lines contain more images of despair and hopelessness including words like “tangled,” “broken,” and “haunted” (5-7). One of the best images is of “[t]he tangled bine-stems [that] scored the sky / [l]ike strings of broken lyres,” because not only does it describe the scenery he is seeing as bleak, the image itself is of destruction and sadness (5-6). Mankind does not walk around the world, rather they “haunt” the night the night and the only thing that they can seek refuge with are “their household fires” (7-8). All over there is a sense of dreariness that hangs over this world. The next stanza does not present a much better image either.

Even the earth itself is described as a “corpse outleant” with his “crypt the cloudy canopy, / [t]he win his death lament” (9-10).The earth’s landscape is no more than a dead body trying to escape it’s coffin. The speaker’s surroundings are dead. Any sign of growth or life has seemed to vanish from thin air and, according the speaker “every spirit upon earth?” is as “fervourless as I” (15-16). The speaker is not the only one out there to be affected by the pain and death of the earth now. In this time of lifeless dark, however, there is one sign of hope.

The speaker hears the “full-hearted evensong / of joy illimited” from “an aged thrush” (19-21). This thrush, one that is “frail, gaunt and small,” has enough love for this world to sing still (21). The gloom of this trodden world is not enough to keep him down. The speaker does not see any reason why such a song should be sang at this time, but this thrush sees a lot to sing about. While the reader does not hear the song, Hardy’s juxtaposition of the response to the song and the response of the song is enough for the reader to understand just how powerful this song is. Upon hearing this song, the language of the poem drastically changes from that of despair and darkness, to words like “ecstatic,” “happy,” and “blessed” (26, 30-31).

The reader can sense the confusion from the speaker, for he just spent two stanzas describing the bleakness of where he is, yet this thrush is bold enough to sing a song full of hope. It is unclear as to whether or not the thrush’s song is enough to help the speaker, but it certainly starts the speaker wondering about the possibility of hope, even if it is not readily present.

And the Future is Certain, Give Us Time to Work it Out: Gerard Manley Hopkins Speaks of God’s Grandeur

After becoming an ordained Jesuit priest, Gerard Manley Hopkins went on to write religious poetry that would speak to many people, asking important questions and touching upon important details (773). In “God’s Grandeur,” Hopkins begins by addressing God’s magnificent power and how it will enrich our world. Hopkins says that “[t]he world will be charged” with God and his power, which is a proclamation of God being the creator of all (1). On one hand it could mean that the world will be full or Gods grandeur, but it could also mean that it is the Earth job, or the Earth has been given the task of receiving God’s grandeur. This speaks to Hopkins connection with God and his beliefs, saying that God had plans for this Earth. Hopkins explains that “[i]t will flame out, like shining from shook foil,” giving it a powerful lightning like effect on the world, taking it by storm (2). This imagery helps to show that even though the earth is charged with grandeur, it will still be very powerful none-the-less. While line two emphasizes how God’s grandeur will spread out all over the world like lighting or a flame, line three touches on its glorious power as “[i]t gathers to greatness, like the ooze of oil / [c]rushed” (3-4). Hopkins sees all of this power that God has over the world, and he wonders why the people do “not reck his rod?” (4). God can strike the world with grandeur, which encompasses both good and destructiveness. Once Hopkins establishes the connection between God’s grandeur and the people of the charged earth, he takes a look at what they have done in the past and why he has come to this conclusion of them not heeding God’s supreme power.

Hopkins uses some intense diction to prove his point in the second stanza. By using words like “trod,” “seared,” “bleared,” “smeared,” “toil,” “smudge,” and “smell,” Hopkins effectively brings negatives images to mind (5-7). In order for Hopkins point to be made, that is that God is more powerful than all and that nature is going to be pure and ever lasting because God made it, he must present the evil, dirtiness of humans. Humans are tainting the earth, it would seem, and trying to use up nature. They move all around the world, messing up whatever their feet land on and making it unholy. That doesn’t matter though, because God is much bigger than that.

The last stanza begins with the reassurance of God’s awesome power: “And for all this, nature is never spent / There lives the dearest freshness deep down things” (9-10). Despite all of the treading that generations have committed all over the earth that God created, nature will live on as well as God’s love. The last image that Hopkins presents is of the Holy Ghost looming over the world: “Because the Holy Ghost over the bent / World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings” (13-14). The last image, while in a way reassuring, is rather dark. The world has the Holy Ghost to watch over it, but it looms over in a very ominous manner. Perhaps this is God showing that he is still on earth, watching and keeping guard, but does not approve of what is happening. Nature will still live on no matter what, and God will watch over us. While the Holy Ghost is brooding, he still has a “warm breast” and “bright wings” to welcome us back (14). Hopkins view of the world here is not terribly bright, but he knows that God is on his side, so no matter how poorly humans may behave and how poorly they take care of the earth, God will be present, waiting to accept us back in his arms.

All Those Beauties in Solid Motion. All Those Beauties, Gonna Swallow You Up: Oscar Wilde the Aesthete

The aesthete movement came at a time of great change in the world. The industrial revolution was going full force, and there were plenty of new and exciting ideas floating about. Cynicism and wit have been around for many ages, but no writer has used either to its full capacity like Oscar Wilde. Being an aesthete himself, Wilde could find anything in nature and see the beauty in it (except for humans, it would seem). In many of Wilde’s writing, he looked into the social lives of the people around him and used them to his satirical advantage. Many of his plays, which are some of his more important and well known writings, contain witty aphorisms and phrases that contain a whole depth of intelligent criticism. On the other side of Wilde, however, was his ability to write poetry. Like some of the writers in the early industrial age, Wilde transported the pastoral beauty of the Romantic Movement, and put it right in the middle of the Victorian era.

In Symphony in Yellow, Wilde finds beauty around the city in a series of yellow objects. The compelling aspects of this poem are the hints of cynicism that lurk below the initial reading. The first stanza turns Wilde’s scene into something that one might find in their garden:

An omnibus across the bridge

Crawls like a yellow butterfly

And, here and there, a passer-by

Shows like a little restless midge. (1-4)

The first lines bring together to opposites and make them one. Wilde compares the omnibus to a lazy butterfly. Upon first glance, this could merely be a joining of the pastoral and industrial, but then again it could also be a comment on state of man. The omnibus was getting more and more popular during Wilde’s time, and when we sees it he compares it to a flighty insect that would normally have no care in the world. A butterfly carelessly meanders from flower to flower eating all day, much like the bus that Wilde sees going from bus stop to bus stop. A powerful steam powered machine is minimized to that of a flower munching insect. The people walking around are then compared to a “little restless midge” (4). Wilde looks at these people and see the chaotic existence of little insects, scrambling about just to make ends meet. So while there is beauty in the joining of the natural insects and busy city life, there is another layer present that speaks to the restless lives that people live. Insects do not live very long lives, and to many people, they are just seen as pointless or at the very least as utilities to eat gnats and other bugs.

Symphony in Yellow is just a glimpse at some of Wilde’s satirical works. Even upon first look, this can be seen as something that is not satirical at all and more of an exercise in Wilde’s aestheticism. The beauty of the world can be seen in so many things. Wilde’s plays contain more of the wit and cynicism that he is famous for, but his poetry gives a special look into a more subtle attack at human nature.

Move a Muscle. Make a Motion: Charles Kingsley Pumps Iron for God

People are always trying to justify their actions. I was speeding because I was late for work. I broke his nose because he took my parking place. I sued him because his burgers made me fat. As human beings, we are all about justifying our actions in ways that make us come out as the good guy. Charles Kingsley wrote, in a letter to his fiancé, about the idea of Masculine Christianity. Apparently, this was a rather popular movement during the Victorian era, while at first a “mocking disparagement for boisterous assertions of bodily strength and energy as the foundation of the pure moral life,” turned into more something that many men aspired to achieve (581). Kingsley begins by addressing the widespread laziness that is affecting the world at his time. He sees the act of laziness as “impious” (581). Kingsley then says that “I could not do half the little good I do do here, if it were not for the strength and activity which some consider coarse and degrading” (581). Kingsley, a clergyman himself, attributes the good he does to the strength he has received from God by doing handiwork and pleasurable things around the country. Kingsley proclaims “how merciful God has been in turning all the strength and hardihood I gained from snipe shooting and hunting, and rowing, and jack-fishing in those magnificent fens to His work! While I was following my own fancies, He was preparing me for His work” (581). Kingsley truly believes that by going out and doing pleasurable things like hunting and rowing, he is more apt at doing God’s work and will. What a fascinating idea! Kingsley justifies his pleasure time by saying that it is making him stronger and therefore more able to be an effective clergyman. It seems that Rev. Kingsley here can bake his cake and eat it too. The first part of his claim sounds a little ridiculous, but it certainly makes sense. The second point he makes is a little more accessible.

Kingsley looks to the work place now. He sees that there does not need to be disconnect between working and the Lord. He says, for instance, “I see no inconsistency…in talking to one man about the points of a horse, and the next moment to another about the mercy of God to sinners” (581). This is a similar tactic that is used today. If a Christian wants to spread the word of the Lord, they will sometimes go about it by approaching someone at work or wherever they may be and striking up a conversation. After making the small talk, they begin to talk to them about their Lord and savior. Kingsley puts it: “I try to catch men by their leading ideas, and so draw them off insensibly to my leading idea” (581). In a way, this idea has made its way to current times and most Christians are exhibiting it now. If we maintain out health and strength, like Kingsley says we should do, we can do God’s work easier. Kingsley also means that one must be good looking and in good health when he says there is “something impious in the neglect of personal health, strength, and beauty” (581). Kingsley wants to reader to take care of him or herself in order to do God’s work. This is, of course, very biblical as well ("Do you not know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit, who is in you, whom you have received from God? You are not your own; 20you were bought at a price. Therefore honor God with your body” 1 Corinthians 6:19-20). Kingsley gives some sound advice, while at times a little strange sounding, it all makes sense.

And Now Love is Here C’mon and Try It: Robert Browning’s Love Among the Ruins

For his poem, Love Among the Ruins, Robert Browning invented an entirely new stanza form. The form itself resembles that of a normal stanza with missing pieces, almost like the time-torn ruins of an old poem. The poem seems to chronicle the sites and times of an old forgotten city, presumably the speaker’s “country’s very capitol” (9). Browning begins the poem with a description of the land, telling of the “quiet-colored end of evening” that “smile[‘s], / Miles and miles / on the solitary pastures” and its inhabitants, the sheep (1-3). His elegant drawing of the surrounding land gives the reader, at first, a sense of peace and beauty, yet the land’s past ruler is “wielding far / peace and war” (12). The last line of this part begins a pattern that follows throughout the next few stanzas where the first six to eight lines of each segment concern the painting of scenery, while the last four lines or so describe times of war for this great city.

Part two begins by the speaker going into a deeper discussion of the countryside in his dear city where it “does not even boast a tree” (13). The only thing that disrupted the flowing hills of the countryside is the palace that “shot its spire / up like fires / o’er the hundred-gated circuit of a wall” (19-21). Even the palace has a sort of violent description of warlike proportions when the speakers describes the palace as shooting its spires up like licking flames. Dispersed even in the descriptions of the town are little bits of violent and harmful diction. Browning uses the peacefulness of the countryside to juxtapose the more violent and warlike city. The last line of the stanza paints a picture of the soldiers that are housed within the city walls. But even the soldiers will march on the pleasant and peaceful countryside that was described in the first and second stanza. The scent of war and the city taint the countryside. But the countryside is still there even after the city is gone. There are only ruins of the city where our speaker is talking from. No matter how powerful the palace soldiers were, or however many used to march on the grasses of the countryside, they are all merely ruins now.

Browning’s speakers details the life and times of the great city throughout the seven stanzas of this sequence, but the main focus is the relationship in parts five through seven. Now the speaker is jumping between the present and the past. He says that “a girl with eager eyes and yellow hair / waits me there…when the king looked, where she looks now, breathless, dumb / till I come” (55-60). The girl stands now where the king once stood, one waiting for war, the other waiting for love; both silent in the wake of what is to come. For the king, it is destruction. Fr the girl, however, it is her love. The king “looked upon the city, every side, / far and wide, / all the mountains topped with temples…all the men!” (61-63, 66). The king saw what he loved: the power, the “lust of glory,” and all of his men (33). The girl sees what she loves. The last half of the stanza draws an amazing picture of the speaker and this woman standing on the hill embracing each other as they “extinguish sight and speech” (71). The only thing that remains in these lands now is love. The speaker tells of the downfall of the great city in the last stanza and ends with one simple phrase: “Love is best” (85). The last image is of love among the ruins. These powerful men who fought to gain land and power all were turned into nothing more than ruins, yet love was able to survive. There, on that hill top, where men once fought and worshiped gold, these two lovers lose themselves in each other: love shall conquer all.

When My Love Stands Next To Your Love: Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Sonnets from the Portuguese

Elizabeth Barrett Browning is one of the most celebrated female authors of the Victorian age, and it is not due to the fact that she was married to Robert Browning (528). Unlike Dorothy Wordsworth, who seems to be included in this book because of her connections with her brother, Barrett Browning was able to make a name for her self because of her fantastic writing. It was her husband, however, that finally convinced her to publish a collection of love sonnets she wrote for him during their courtship under the pseudonym Sonnets from the Portuguese. Sonnet 28 contains many feelings that one who is in the middle of a courtship would have. Barrett Browning begins by addressing the sonnets with quite the negative perspective, saying “[m]y letters! all dead paper, mute and white!” (1). The first line does not make her sound incredibly confident in her writing ability or her relationship that is at hand, yet later on in the sonnet she describes the meeting that Robert Browning has set up. Still, it can easily be understood that her she does not feel that her writings are worth anything while she is writing either to him, or in her personal sonnets she has written. This sonnet tells of the first time that they intend to meet, so she has not seen him for the first 28 sonnets. Her doubts are expressed through her writing. Barrett Browning seems to be afraid when she explains that her letters “seem alive and quivering / [a]gainst my tremulous hands which loose the string / [a]nd let them drop down on my knee to-night.” (2-4). After tonight, her fear for the relationship she is having can rest at ease. As she lets these letters “drop down,” she no longer has anything to worry about. Yet her “tremulous hands” express a certain amount of anxiety or fear. They are not dead, for Barrett Browning feels that they have some enormous amount of power that she is still very aware of.

She doesn’t want to give up these poems (obviously…she ends up writing forty-four altogether). The next four stanzas tell of the planned meeting between the lovers. It is their first meeting and quite an exciting event for Barrett Browning. She says “he wished to have me in his sight / [o]nce as a friend: this fixed a day in spring / to come and touch my hand” (5-7). I can see how, in this time, a letter from a man like that would be something that is very exciting. I suppose now-a-days a letter like that would be very exciting. The reader sees her doubt in her letters turn to an excitement for the future meeting for while it is a “simple thing,” she “wept for it!” (7-8). What an exciting event! When Robert Browning used the phrases “Dead, I love thee” and “I am thine,” Barrett Browning cannot hold in her happiness (9, 11). Her happiness can be found in the fact that she holds onto the letter from him so much that “its ink has paled” (11). Pardon the cliché, but how poetic! The next line seals the deal, when Barrett Browning confesses that the ink has paled “[w]ith lying at my heart that beat too fast” (12). As she clutched onto the letter, she held it close to her breast with happiness and joy. That brings to mind such a wonderful image.

The last two lines of the sonnet are the most cryptic to me. She ends with saying “[a]nd this…O Love, they words have ill availed / [i]f, what this said, I dared repeat at last” (13-14). She speaks of his words as being unhelpful if she is to repeat them. If she acts to excited, perhaps she will feel as if she is overstepping her bounds. She cannot let Robert Browning know of her excitement because that would be too unladylike. Barrett Browning wrote the sonnets without any intention for them to be seen by anyone, including Robert Browning. When she eventually showed him the sonnets, he found them to be amazing (530). She wrote all of these sonnets as a way of expressing her happiness and love for Mr. Browning before they were officially together and married, almost like a diary of their courtship.

He Feels the Power of the Past Behind Him: Tennyson’s The Kraken

Alfred, Lord Tennyson was known for his writing, being named Poet Laureate, deemed a Lord and then a Baron, and making thousands of pounds a year (587). Anyway you look at it, the man had it set for life. Some of his poetry, especially the poetry included in this book, is dark and sad. In his poem, The Kraken, Tennyson illuminates the darkness of the sea for a quick look at the mythical sea beast that leaves the reader more sad than afraid.

Tennyson begins the poem by describing the decent into the darkness. His choice of words alone gives the reader a dark and foreboding chill, as he sends us “[b]elow the thunders of the upper deep; / Far, far beneath the abysmal sea” (1-2). These “thunders” serve as the gates to the deep where the beast sleeps, in a place that is even worse than the “abysmal sea.” So even before we reach our destination, the reader is given a set of words that are uneasy. The creature he is describing lives somewhere buried far from the human eye where we are supposed to fear it. From the beginning, Tennyson gives this creature horrible dwelling place for “[h]is ancient, dreamless, uninvaded sleep” (3). The Kraken, something that we should fear, lives quite an uninteresting life. Caged in the deep of the ocean, he has a “dreamless” sleep forever. Tennyson has taken this huge mythical beast that is to be feared and has turned it into nothing more than a sad bump on a log “[b]attening upon huge seaworms in his sleep” (12). He has turned a god of the sea into a lowly creature that is destined to sleep on the bottom of the sea and get fat.

Tennyson maintains the creatures sheer power, however, by having the only thing that can kill it the end of time. Tennyson writes that “the latter fire shall heat the deep” (13). The end of days is the only event that can disturb this creature’s slumber and “[t]hen once by man and angels to be seen, / In roaring he shall rise and on the surface die” (14-15). Tennyson makes this creature out to be something that wants nothing from us. The beast is now a being that would never want to harm man, for he is in a hell of his own.

By the end of the poem, Tennyson has described an awful event that leaves the reader wanting to comfort the poor beast rather than run from him. He is destined to sleep in the bowels of the sea in a place far worse than anyone can imagine; a place where the real threats that are even past the “sickly light” will never venture to (7). Tennyson easily sways the reader with powerful words like “thunders,” “abysmal,” “shadowy,” and “sickly,” that slowly degrades the mythical, powerful beast of the sea. The Kraken, a creature known for its power and destruction, is portrayed as a giant nothing. The only time the kraken is to be seen, even by God and the angels, it would seem, is his dying day: the day the earth is destroyed.