For generations, the poem ‘Darkling thrush’ has been merely treated as a pessimistic, sceptical poem and even though its modernist overtures are recognised, it is rarely observed from a Derridean perspective. This essay attempts to place Hardy in a Derridean universe and investigate his metaphysical beliefs.

The poem, ‘Darkling Thrush’ is evidently a poem placed on the cornerstone of agnostic philosophy of Hardy. The world which Hardy delineates in the poem is a Godless, non-Logocentric, decentralised world projecting an array of visions while disrupting the preponderant idea of the unified which is manifested in various ways throughout the poem, one of the most vexatious yet enigmatic techniques of them being disrupting the very logic which the poem propagates. Its paradoxical expression of the overwhelming yet futile longing of the humankind for the Logos, the Word is its path of its accomplishment of such interior logical chasm and ultimate disruption. But what makes the poem verily laudable is neither merely its capability of deconstructing its metaphysical framework nor the revelation of Hardy’s beliefs almost wordlessly but the inherent capability of its language for destabilising the linguistic framework in which it itself works.   

Expounding Derrida’s concept of Logocentrism, Spivak says, ‘the belief that the first and last things are the Logos, the Word, the Divine Mind, the infinite understanding of God, an infinitely creative subjectivity, and, closer to our time, the selfpresence of full self-consciousness.’[1] On the same line, she further explains the existence of inseverable relationship between Logocentrism and Phonocentrism where she remarks, ‘phonocentrism-logocentrism relates to centrism itself-the human desire to posit a "central" presence at beginning and end:’[2] 

Hardy’s notion of a decentralized universe dovetails Derrida’s sarcastic opposition of Logocentrism and Phonocentrism in the Western metaphysics, the essential undertones whereof ceaselessly haunt the poem commencing from the initial line of it; the complex metaphoricity of the word ‘coppice” is itself’[3] indicative of it. The word ‘coppice’ refers to ‘an area of closely planted trees in which the trees are cut back regularly to provide wood; Such a semantic purport of the word emphasises its metaphoric character and enables it to act as a metaphor for destabilisation of the existing structure of a language (‘cut back regularly’) to shape a flexible, multiple, non-phonocentric and non-logocentric language (‘to provide for wood’, here, presuming the wood’s rigid, inflexible disposition). Such a notion is reinforced not only by Lacan’s conception of a metaphor’s equation with condensation, on a linguistic plain but by the amphibolic fallacy engrained Hardy’s phrase ‘coppice gate’. The word ‘coppice’ is lexically either a noun or a verb, yet Hardy employs it as an adjective, thereby attributing an adjectival sense of meaning to it. This seemingly trivial lexical inadvertence assumes the form of a lexical crisis giving rise to a semantic indeterminacy by posing dual, antagonistic meanings, the initial one of it being, a gate made of coppice, thus affirming its literal senselessness, in turn, corroborating its figurative usage and the latter one being, a gate or portal leading towards a coppice, yet its contravenes Hardy’s adjectival linguistic as well as literal use of it; thus the metaphoric illustration of the phrase seems to be the only plausible explanation when linguistic as well as literal senses break off. Hence, in a way, the usage of this phrase also disrupts the logic which it itself propagates for its logical comprehension. This notion of linguistic destabilisation is further emphasised by these lines of the poem:

‘The tangled bine-stems scored the sky

Like strings of broken lyres’ (I.v-vi)

The violent act of the tangled bine-stems’ scoring or incising the sky provides a penetrative force to it and therefore, they collectively act as a phallic representative in the poem. Although the vivific act might , at a perfunctory gaze, appear to be a symbolic of and tropic towards phallic triumph or phallocentrism in the world, the comparison of the ‘bine-stems’ ensuing with the ‘strings of broken lyres’, as observed in the following line, and the attribution of the ‘tangled’ epithet to them, demarcating their broken and abandoned and mouldered(indicated by the word ‘tangled’) state , depicts Hardy’s dethronement of Jones and Freud’s phallocentrism, in close affinity to Derrida’s criticism of phallocentrism. Besides it, although Platonic philosophy is itself somewhat phallocentric, most famously Derrida’s critique of Plato’s Pharmacy’s, the phallus can also easily trace its connection to lower appetites or eros part of Plato’s tripartite soul, The ‘sky’ or aethereal world serves as the symbol of Plato’s Intelligible realm and a soul’s union  with the Intelligible through its sensualistic and vegetative powers established and manifested in the act of penetration is vehemently unacceptable to Plato. Therefore, with the evocation of such, partly erotic and partly violent, imagery of the bine-stems, Hardy effectively disrupts the logocentric universe of Platonic philosophy. Furthermore, the ‘strings of the broken lyres’ are a classical emblem of disharmony and disunity. The Pythagoreans believed that the soul itself was a harmony and in Plato’s Phaedrus, Simias beautifully draws an analogy assimilating the soul with a harmony and the body with a lyre, though Socrates later refutes his argument in favour of his argument about the immortality of the soul, his standpoint does not stand overtly and completely dispelled. Hence, by the ‘broken’ state of the portraiture of the ‘strings of the lyre’, Hardy, in a way, delipidates phallagocentrism, Derrida’s neologism of phallocentrism and logocentrism dominating the Western world. In addition to it, Hardy’s decentralisation of language is as well evidenced by these two lines:

‘And all mankind that haunted nigh

Had sought their household fires.’ (I.vii-viii)

Lexically, the word ‘mankind’ is a collective noun (which is always singular) that cannot logically be referred to with the use of the plural pronoun ‘their ‘or juxtaposed with the plural word ‘all’, yet Hardy’s employment of it signifies a special function performed by it in the poem. It signifies the segregation of Hardy with the rest of the mankind, not with the intention of any insolent elitist preoccupation but with the intention of demonstrating his solo struggle in the face of logocentric and phonocentric challenges in the linguistic as well as in the universal plain, and his incessant combat with the linguistic crisis of representation, the latter whereof is especially manifested in Hardy choice of a ‘frail, gaunt and small thrush’ as the signifier of ‘blessed Hope’ instead of the Victorian Romantic tradition of employing more delicate, corporeally as well as emotionally beautiful and optimistic birds such as Keats’s nightingale , Shelly’s skylark , Wordsworth ‘s cuckoo or even Coleridge’s albatross etc, while ‘all mankind’ or the entire human race resort to the safe haven of the delusion of the Logos. It not only ulteriorly evinces the destruction of the linguistic logic which it itself initially propounded but echoes the existential tones of Hardy as expressed by the isolation of the explicitly subjective ‘I’ from the rest of the collective ‘mankind’. It is perhaps these reverberations that compels Sheila Berger to attach the epithet of ‘existential isolationist’ to Hardy’s name. She argues Hardy to be immersed in the division, fragmentation and diffraction of his self.[4]

Hence, the poem successfully delineates the implicit destabilisation of language through the evocation of these stoic but pithy imageries. 

The tone of the poem is essentially fatalistic, despairing and despondent which is particularly intensified in the second stanza with in the second stanza with the lament of the ‘Century’s expiry’, the personified Century representing the era of Logocentrism and a belief in the ontological stability. The palatalised, hard ‘C’ sounds permeating words like ‘corpse’, ‘century’, ‘crypt’, ‘cloudy’ and ‘canopy’ in the second and third lines of the second stanzas testify the analogy of the Century’s corpse with the ‘sharp features’ of ‘land’ as mentioned in the first line of the second stanza.  These despairing tones of Hardy are not merely the pessimistic ravings of a realist, but paradoxically, the expression of overwhelming longing of the humankind for the metaphysical Centre. Although such representation of Hardy is somewhat neutralised by a realisation of the vainness of any attempt to rationalise the irrational, it cannot achieve perfect neutralisation of it and as such, inevitably disrupts the metaphysical as well as linguistic of the poem itself. The employment of the word ‘eye’ in the phrase ‘eye of the day’ in the fourth line of the first stanza (‘The weakening eye of day.’) indicating the presence of a diurnal Centre emblematising the metaphysical Centre from a linguistic as well as metaphysical perspective., corroborates such ardent longing of humankind fir the ultimate Centre. However, the poet’s realisation of the fruitlessness of any such desire or any attempt to materialise it is made explicit by juxtaposing the word ‘weakening’ beside the word ‘eye’ signifying the latter’s exercise of an inhibiting effect on the contradictory catalytic effect of the former. The inchmeal dusking of the final day of the Century concluding in the demise of the Century itself symbolises the imminent dawn of a decentralising Century. Furthermore, Hardy’s choice and employment of the metrical scale of the poem robustly delineates such desire and its futility. The poem’s metre fluctuates between lines written in iambic tetrameter and the ones written in iambic trimeter. 

According to Biblical numerology, the number ‘three’ represents spiritual perfection, for instance, the Lord was resurrected on the third day of His crucifixion, three Apostles, Peter, James and John saw the Lord’s transfiguration, three persons comprise the Holy Trinity and countless more. Although the number ‘four’ is not found in explicit association with the profane, on the contrary, ofttimes, it represented the sacred, it undeniable contains a lesser degree of perfection in comparison to number three or seven, along with its occasional associations with the unholy and the wicked, for instance, the four generals of Alexander who took over him, four horns (gentile powers) of Zechariah and four acts of God’s judgement for the idolators of Jerusalem. Therefore,  the fluctuation of the metrical pattern of Hardy’s verses , sometimes surprisingly staggering at a moment of consistency, for instance  in the third and fourth lines of the first stanza, the three consecutive lines of the second stanza beginning with the second line - each of them containing a trimeter and yet sometimes, overflowing its seething cauldron of inconsistency, for instance, in the third line(trimetre) and fourth lines(tetrameter) of the first stanza, the fifth line(tetrameter) and sixth line(trimetre) of the second stanza, the short metrically incomplete fourth line of the third stanza(‘Of joy illimited;’), demonstrates the overall instability, inconsistency and limitlessness of language with occasional moments of constancy and consistency, despite the symptomatic human inclination towards its centralisation. The instability of language is further vivified vin the third and fourth lines of the second stanza in the reference of Century with two incompatible pronouns : ‘his’ as well as ‘its’ , causing the amphiboly of representation as it might be interpreted as an inanimate, neuter representation of Century as commanded by the pronoun ‘it’, or as an animate , masculine personification of Century as commanded by the pronoun ‘his’, or finally, as the absorption of pastness, presentness and futureness of linear times in the vortex of cyclical and synchronic time, resulting from the proleptic function played by the pronoun ‘his’ in the expiration of Century and the analeptic function played by the pronoun ‘it’ in its death. Furthermore, here, Hardy’s delineation of instability of language symbolically reverberates the Existential notion of Absurdity and chaos embracing the chaotic, inconsistent nature of human life with equanimity and stoicism and meaninglessness of life beyond our determination and attribution of one to it.  Thus, these scenes from the poem presents that the poem shatters its linguistic and metaphysical framework in which it itself is functioning. 

In addition to it, these lines of Hardy pellucidly illustrate his adherence to the Derridean principle of dissemination. 

‘The ancient pulse of germ and birth

Was shrunken hard and dry,’ (II.v-vi)

In spite of its superficial appearance of continuity entailing from its structural enjambment, its effects are anathematised by the metonymic function performed by the words ‘germ and birth’. This phrase is literally tropic towards germination of seeds, in turn, human as well as nature’s procreation and regeneration but, needless to say, for sexual beings, procreation without insemination is nothing but a dream. 

As a counteraction to Lacan’s Phallus as a storehouse for all absent desires, Spivak says, ‘Derrida's cry is "dissemination," the seed that neither inseminates nor is recovered by the father, but is scattered abroad …. Exploiting a false etymological kinship between semantics and semen, Derrida offers this version of textuality: A sowing that does not produce plants, but is simply infinitely repeated. A semination that is not insemination but dissemination, seed spilled in vain, an emission that cannot return to its origin in the father. Not an exact and controlled polysemy, but a proliferation of always different, always postponed meanings.’[5] 

Considering Hardy destabilisation of language, as shown above,  I argue that the lack of  insemination’ in Hardy is rather an act of dissemination than polysemy which is because the witnessed in the ‘ancient pulse’ of germination symbolising polysemy , the multiplicity but finitude meanings, was ‘shrunken hard and dry’ the representative of the end of a polysemic era due to which ‘every spirit’ paradoxically including Hardy ‘seemed fervourless’ in seeking meaning of life but as a proleptic of a new dawn of an era of ‘proliferation’ of endless and disseminated meanings, a ‘voice’, the trace of the Transcendental signified’ arose which ‘always postponed meanings’ in différance.

Amidst such instability of language, the precise significance of the ‘blessed Hope’ brought by the thrush, if there exists one amongst such dissemination of meanings of a language, and its relationship with the thrush seems quite polemic and difficult to ascertain. It seems intriguing that with the introduction of the thrush in the third stanza of the poem, the thrush seems to be the central position of it, prior to which, the speaker himself and the century’s departure assumed the central position, yet there another occurs a shift in the centre as soon as the soon as the idea of the ‘blessed hope’ ins introduced in the poem. It not only evinces Derrida’s notion of a shifting centre with no fixed frame or point of reference but also enunciates the foundation of the concept of the thrush along with the concept of blessed hope foundation on the Derridean notions of trace and différance. The corporeal appearance of the thrush ‘frail, small and gaunt’ in stature illustrates its affinity with mundanity, thus acting as a mere ‘signifier’ in a semiotic system of endless signifiers, in spite of its superficial centrism in the poem and hence, what really transcends the ‘happy good night-air’ of the thrush is its ‘voice’ manifesting the ‘reducible absence’ of the transcendental signified ‘within the presence of’ its ‘trace’, i.e., the ‘blessed Hope’. Regarding the transcendental signified, Derrida comments, “There has to be a transcendental signified for the différance between signifier and signified to be somewhere absolute and irreducible. It is not by chance that the thought of being, as the thought of this transcendental signified, is manifested above all in the voice: in a language of words [mots].”[6] However, it must be an inevitable necessity that Hardy is ‘unaware’ of ‘the blessed Hope’ because the meaning of it or the Transcendental Signified is always infinitely deferred in différance. Hardy’s ending of the poem with a sceptical note is indicative of nothing but the futility of human desire or effort to consciously possess the knowledge of it. Such sceptical conviction of Hardy lucidly justifies his agnostic attitude regarding which Elliot comments, “In the relapses of his individualistic faith, he could not stay himself upon the profound meaning that there is in the painful story of human institutions and conventions: he could find there only a "chasm sightless and drear." In this respect, also, Hardy's case is the sequel of Shelley's. But he has none of Shelley's wailing lyric ardency. He scans the landscape with eyes accustomed to the gloom. Objects come out plainly enough in a sort of ironic twilight; and he watches them with an affectionate leer.”[7]

In spite of Hardy’s association with Modernist Derridean thought, his connection with the romantic Victorian tradition cannot be severed, not even in regard to this poem. Hardy was the last Victorian poet, who indeed belonged to the Romantic tradition. It is indeed a grave injustice to treat a piece of literature in isolation as a product of spontaneous and mysterious origin. Almost every piece of literature is in some way a vocalisation of its literary antecedents. Dennis Taylor[8] argues that Hardy specifically connects the poem with some Wordsworthian sources. In this poem, the words ‘can listen’ of Wordsworth's poem ‘To the Cuckoo’ gets moulded into the past conditional of Hardy’s conclusion: ‘could think.’ In a place where ‘every spirit upon earth / Seemed fervourless as I,’ and Hardy hears an aged thrush sing full-hearted evensong / Of joy illimited’, Wordsworth writes blessed Bird! the earth we pace/Again appears to b'/An unsubstantial, faery place;/That is fit home for Thee!’ Their conclusion lies in extreme proximity and intricacy. Taylor points out that ‘The Green Linnet,’ and Wordsworth's ‘To a Sky-Lark’ are some other sources of ‘The Darkling Thrush’. Furthermore, a fading echo of Coleridge’s ‘Eolian Harp’ is hearkened in the rupture of the lyrical poetical tools, i.e., the ‘broken lyres’ in this poem. The poem’s titular word ‘Darkling’ has a rich literary history descending from Milton’s Paradise Lost (‘sings darkling.’) to Keats’s ‘Ode to a Nightingale’ (‘Darkling I listen’) and finally to Mathew Arnold’s ‘Dover Beach’ (‘darkling plain’). Keats’s vivid description of the nightingale singing ‘In such an ecstasy!’ in his ‘Ode to a Nightingale’ casts its repercussion upon the ‘ecstatic sound’ of Hardy’s thrush and the nightingale’s ‘pouring forth’ of its ‘soul’ is dimly echoed in the choice of Hardy’s thrush ‘to fling his soul’. Hardy’s thrush’s ‘full-hearted evensong’ acts as a reflection of Shelley’s skylark’s pouring its ‘full heart’ in his ‘To a Skylark’ and the continuation of the hymnic songs of Shelley’s skylark till the world is wrought with ‘hopes’ projects an obscure literal resemblance with the ‘blessed Hope’ known by Hardy’s thrush. The thrush’s ‘joy illimited’ delineates a mimetic gleam of the ‘shrill delight’ and ‘clear keen joyance’ of Shelley's skylark. Therefore, Hardy’s ‘Darkling Thrush’ proved to be an enriching treasure trove of Romantic meditative lyrical poetry and tradition though its ceaseless seas of engrossing allusions.

Footnotes

[1] Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Charkravorty Spivak, The Johns Hopkins University Press Baltimore and London, First American edition, 1976, Translator’s Preface: pp.1xvii.

[2] Ibid 1xviii

[3] ‘I leant upon a coppice gate’(I.i)

[4] Berger, Sheila. Preface. Thomas Hardy and Visual Structures: Framing, Disruption, Process. New York: New York UP, 1990. xi-xiv.

[5] Derrida, trans. Spivak, Of Grammatology, pp. xi, lxv

[6] Ibid pp.20

[7] Elliott, G. R. ―Spectral Etching in the Poetry of Thomas Hardy. PMLA. 43. 4 (1928): 1185-1195. Modern Language Association. JSTOR. 24 Sep 2014.

[8]. Taylor, Dennis . “Hardy and Wordsworth.” Victorian Poetry, vol.24,no.4,1986,pp.441-454. JSTOR. www.jstor.org/stable/40002132.

Bibliography

·         Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Charkravorty Spivak, The Johns Hopkins University Press Baltimore and London, First American edition, 1976
·         Berger, Sheila. Preface. Thomas Hardy and Visual Structures: Framing, Disruption, Process. New York: New York UP.
·         Elliott, G. R. ―Spectral Etching in the Poetry of Thomas Hardy. PMLA. 43. 4 (1928): 1185-1195. Modern Language Association. JSTOR. 24 Sep 2014.
·         Thomas Hardy, Gordon Beningfield, The Darkling Thrush, and Other Poems,         Salem House Pub , United States of America,1 November 1985. 
Taylor, Dennis . “Hardy and Wordsworth.” Victorian Poetry, vol.24,no.4,1986,pp.441-454. JSTOR. www.jstor.org/stable/40002132.