The poem’s title, “The Darkling Thrush,” signals the importance of the poem’s avian character. Birds were a popular subject for the 19th century Romantics, often symbolizing the visionary and restorative power of poetry. Many Romantic poets, from William Wordsworth to John Keats to Matthew Arnold, wrote poems wherein birdsong lifts a despondent speaker’s spirits. Emily Dickinson explicitly connects birds to hope in her 1891 poem “‘Hope’ is the thing with feathers.”

Hardy may have had the American poet Walt Whitman in mind when he chose the thrush for his poem. In Whitman’s “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d” (1865), a eulogy for President Abraham Lincoln, a hidden thrush sings in a swamp in similarly funereal circumstances. Alternatively, Hardy may have chosen a thrush for more mundane, ornithological reasons: Thrushes are unusually active in winter. The image of an elderly little bird resolutely singing in even the darkest of times may have spoken to the poet. Hardy was himself an older man at the time of the poem’s composition, and he suffered from ill health for most of his life.

It is unclear whether Hardy intended the thrush as an inspiring or bleak figure. Like the seeds of Lines 13 and 14—which are usually symbols of potential, but here are hard and dry—so the bird is “aged” (Line21), perhaps unlikely to survive the winter. The bird’s determination to sing may reflect pathetic mindlessness rather than determined optimism. Such an interpretation would render the poem an ironic twist on more positive examples of the motif, like Keats’s “Ode to a Nightingale.”