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Abstract. Thomas Hardy's great and central poem, "The Darkling Thrush," is a response to Hardy's Romantic precursors, particularly Wordsworth. Like "Tintern Abbey," Hardy's poem stages the moment of poetic perception in a way that recapitulates the confrontation of subject and object that is central to post-Kantian philosophy, Hardy's readings in which inform the poem. The poem achieves a transcendence of the mutual implication of subject and object through the use of the thrush as the voice of the unconscious spirit in nature and through a dialectic of sound and writing imagery.
THOMAS HARDY'S GREAT AND central poem, "The Darkling Thrush,"1 signals that it is to be read as a response to his precursors. "Darkling" evokes Keats's "Ode to a Nightingale" and Arnold's "Dover Beach." Byron had used "cloudy canopy" to describe Parnassus in Childe Harold's Pilgrimage. A particularly ambitious signal is "coppice," a variant of "copse," a crucial word in Wordsworth's "Tintern Abbey."2 "Gate" fixes the coppice at the perceptual threshold, whereas Wordsworth located the copse at the center of the landscape.
Wordsworth situates the observer opposite, but in connection with, the natural setting. Beyond what is present to the senses lies a remote reality:
Once again
Do I behold these steep and lofty cliffs,
That on a wild secluded scene impress
Thoughts of more deep seclusion.
On the near side, "here, under this dark sycamore," is the poet, between whom and nature, in its most remote aspect ("these steep and lofty cliffs"), extends a continuum, the gradual shadings of which reflect a faith that the inner life of things can be apprehended:
The day is come when I again repose
Here, under this dark sycamore, and view
These plots of cottage-ground, these orchard-tufts,
Which at this season, with their unripe fruits,
Are clad in one green hue, and lose themselves
'Mid groves and copses.
The "cottage-ground" and "orchard-tufts," evidence of human organization of the natural world, blend subtly into the "groves and copses." While an orchard or a grove may be planted, a copse is a naturally growing wood that is periodically cut, and thus it is truly something we "half create" but also merely "perceive."3 The human seems natural, the natural human, and it is unclear whether certain features are "hedgerows" or...