LYCOS RETRIEVER 
Thrush: Darkling Thrush
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[T]o mention "The Darkling Thrush" and "Ode to a Nightingale" in the same breath is a commonplace, just for the curious tie of the rare word "darkling" and the symbolic bird in both poems. But on closer inspection, the correspondences between the two poems are startling. Keats' poem likewise opens with desolation: "My heart aches, and a drowsy numbness pains/ My sense, as though of hemlock I had drunk." Its third line ... contains a reference to dregs: "Or emptied some dull opiate to the drains." And its bird is also described as "happy," "'Tis not through envy of they happy lot,/ But being too happy in thine happiness."
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Thomas Hardy’s gloomy poem about the turn of the twentieth century, “The Darkling Thrush,” remains one of his most popular and anthologized lyrics. Written on the eve of the new century and first published in Graphic with the subtitle “By the Century’s Deathbed” and then published in London Times on New Year’s Day, 1901, the thirty-twoline poem uses a bleak and wintry landscape as a metaphor for the close of the nineteenth century and the joyful song of a solitary thrush as a symbolic image of the dawning century. Like much of Hardy’s writing, “The Darkling Thrush” embodies the writer’s despair and pessimism. This is partially offset... by the artfulness of the poem itself. Hardy was sixty years old when he penned the lyric, far past the life expectancy for a man of his time. A few years earlier he had stopped writing novels, after critics panned Jude the Obscure, and turned to writing poetry exclusively.
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"The Darkling Thrush" looks to a new century, not only in its subject, but in its style. If a Hardy poem seems rough hewn (awkward syntax, words with the country soil still clinging to their roots), it is not by ineptitude, but by design. "Inexact rhymes now and then are far more pleasing than correct ones," he claimed; and he detested a "style like a worn half-pence--all the fresh images rounded off by rubbing..." He was striving not for the sterile virtue of perfection, but for an effect of spontaneity, warts and all. He and A. E. Housman who, with their colloquial diction and plain speaking, are among the first modern poets, showed a way out of the smoothly-wrought and gilded bars of high Victorian verse to a poetry of the new century.
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Darkling Thrush