#sweetspeak poetry

[dabiconcordia]

"The Darkling Thrush"

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 fervorless 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-beruffled plume, Had chosen thus to fling 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. By Thomas Hardy