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PARTISAN REVIEW
of-the-century poem out of where no poet had ever been before.
The conjunction "terrestrial things" suggests a detachment whose na–
ture is not exactly human. The point of view attained here through the
proximity of two abstract notions is, strictly speaking, inanimate. The
only evidence of human manufacture is that it is indeed being "written";
and it gives you a sense that language is capable of arrangements that re–
duce a human being to, at best, the function of a scribe. That it is lan–
guage that utilizes a human being, not the other way around. That lan–
guage flows into the human domain from the realm of nonhuman truths
and dependencies, that it is ultimately the voice of inanimate matter, and
that poetry just registers now and then its ripple effect.
I am far from suggesting that this is what Thomas Hardy was after in
this line. Rather, it was what this line was after in Thomas Hardy, and he
responded. And as though he was somewhat perplexed by what escaped
from under his pen, he tried to domesticate it by resorting to familiarly
Victorian diction in "Afar or nigh around." Yet the diction of this
conjunction was destined to become the diction of twentieth-century
poetry, more and more.
It
is only two or three decades from "terrestrial
things" to Auden's "necessary murder" and "artificial wilderness." For its
"terrestrial things" line alone, "The Darkling Thrush" is a turn-of-the–
century poem.
And the fact that Hardy responded to the inanimate voice of this
conjunction had to do obviously with his being well prepared to heed
this sort of thing, not only by his agnosticism (which might be enough),
but by practically any poem's vector upward, by its gravitation toward
epiphany. In principle, a poem goes down the page as much as it goes
up in spirit, and "The Darkling Thrush" adheres to this principle closely.
On this course, irrationality is not an obstacle, and the ballad's tetrame–
ters and trimeters bespeak a considerable familiarity with irrationality:
That I could think there trembled through
His happy good-night air
Some blessed Hope, whereof he knew
And I was unaware.
What brings our author to this "blessed Hope" is above all the centrifu–
gal momentum developed by the amassment of thirty alternating tetram–
eters and trimeters, requiring either vocal or mental resolution, or both.
In this sense, this turn-of-the-century poem is very much about itself,
about its composition which - by happy coincidence - gravitates toward
its finale the way the century does. A poem, in fact, offers a century its
own, not necessarily rational, version of the future, thereby making the
