Toward the “Coppice Gate”: A Reading of Thomas Hardy’s “The Darkling Thrush”

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.