Abstract

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:On the near side, “here, under this dark ..