JOSEPH BRODSKY
355
E. Housman. To these you might add Charles Darwin himself, Carlyle,
Disraeli, John Stuart Mill, Ruskin, Samuel Butler, Walter Pater. But let's
stop here: that should give you the general idea of the mental and stylis–
tic parameters - or pressures - pertinent at the time for our poet. Let's
leave Cardinal Newman out of it, because our man was a biological de–
terminist and agnostic; let's also leave out the Bronte sisters, Dickens,
Thackeray, Trollope, Robert Louis Stevenson, and other fiction writers,
because they mattered to Mr. Hardy when he was one of them but not,
for instance, when he set out to write "The Darkling Thrush," which is
our first poem.
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-beruffied plume,
Had chosen thus to fling his soul
Upon the growing gloom.
