Some blessed Hope

Birdprints in the snow at Beckville.

These pretty little footprints delighted me on a recent trip out to one of my churches.  I thought surely they would call a poem to my English major’s mind.

They did not, but here’s a winter bird poem that, if I were more of a Hardy fan, I might have thought of myself (the honor goes instead to The Poetry Foundation):

The Darkling Thrush

BY THOMAS HARDY

I leant upon a coppice gate

      When Frost was spectre-grey,

And Winter’s dregs made desolate

      The weakening eye of day.

The tangled bine-stems scored the sky

      Like strings of broken lyres,

And all mankind that haunted nigh

      Had sought their household fires.

The land’s sharp features seemed to be

      The Century’s corpse outleant,

His crypt the cloudy canopy,

      The wind his death-lament.

The ancient pulse of germ and birth

      Was shrunken hard and dry,

And every spirit upon earth

      Seemed fervourless as I.

At once a voice arose among

      The bleak twigs overhead

In a full-hearted evensong

      Of joy illimited;

An aged thrush, frail, gaunt, and small,

      In blast-beruffled plume,

Had chosen thus to fling his soul

      Upon the growing gloom.

So little cause for carolings

      Of such ecstatic sound

Was written on terrestrial things

      Afar or nigh around,

That I could think there trembled through

      His happy good-night air

Some blessed Hope, whereof he knew

      And I was unaware.

I know, it’s a little . . . nineteenth century, but still.  The idea that a tired old bird knows of “some blessed Hope” that we don’t is kind of a pretty one.

Where do you find hope on grey winter days?