The Thrush’s Song: Hope or Skepticism in Hardy’s Work?

I tried several ways to refute ChatGPT’s interpretation of Hardy’s poem, but GPT countered each of the arguments I made, insisting that its interpretation was the correct one, perhaps the only one.

First, I tried looking up positive interpretations of the poem like this one posted at St James Cathedral and pasted this part of the post into ChatGPT:


Just at this low ebb, when the world, both without and within, seems drained of life and energy, something happens. A thrush begins to sing. In many ways, the thrush shares the influence of the bleak landscape: he is no bright-eyed young bird, but “an aged thrush, frail, gaunt, and small, / In blast-beruffled plume.” And yet, the thrush sings, “in a full-hearted evensong / Of joy illimited.” “Evensong,” of course, means more than just a song at evening. It’s one name for the Church’s liturgy of evening prayer. The old thrush doesn’t just sing, he carols joyfully; he “fling[s] his soul / Upon the growing gloom.”
 
The poet is astonished, because there is nothing in view, far or near, that suggests a cause for this ecstatic singing. The cause, then, must be not in what is seen, but in what is unseen. The poem ends with doubt—a wholesome doubt. Perhaps there is something beyond the gloom, cold, and darkness of the world. Perhaps there is “some blessed Hope, whereof he knew / And I was unaware.”

to see how ChatGPTwould respond to it.

I got back a five-page rebuttal, beginning with this:

To refute that reading persuasively, you don’t deny the poem’s ambiguity—you show that the interpretation overstates what Hardy actually allows the speaker to claim and subtly turns skepticism into affirmation. The key is to stay rigorously inside Hardy’s language.

Here’s how I would dismantle it, point by point.

I’ll spare you all the five page reply and leave you with this 7 Point refutation of the St. James Chapel reading:


1. The Reading Smuggles Belief Where Hardy Allows Only Supposition


2. “Wholesome Doubt” Softens Hardy’s Stark Ending‘


3. The Religious Language Is Explicitly Undercut, Not Endorsed

4. The Thrush Is Not a Religious Messenger—It Is a Problem

5. Hardy’s Historical Position Makes the “Hopeful” Reading Unlikely


6. The Ending Does Not Invite the Reader to Believe


7. A Cleaner Counter-Reading

A more textually faithful conclusion would be:

The thrush’s song does not restore faith or reveal hidden meaning. Instead, it dramatizes the speaker’s modern predicament: confronted with an inexplicable expression of joy, he can neither explain it nor share it. Hope may exist somewhere—but it is no longer available to human consciousness.

That preserves the poem’s power without converting it into consolation.

One-Sentence Refutation

That interpretation turns Hardy’s carefully fenced-off speculation into affirmation, mistaking the poem’s acknowledgment of unknowable hope for a belief in it—something Hardy’s final line explicitly refuses.

If you’d like, I can also show how this “optimistic misreading” resembles the way Darkling Thrush is often taught defensively in schools—as if Hardy needed to be rescued from his own bleakness.

I’ll have to admit that I don’t know what “smuggles” means, and it seems unlikely that Hardy would offer a religious response to the bleak surroundings, since his novels reveal him more as an agnostic/atheist than a Christian. So, while I would agree that the Thrush is not a “religious messenger, “I don’t see it as a problem. I’m not exactly sure what GPT means by “ The Ending Does Not Invite the Reader to Believe.” If that means that the poem isn’t an attempt to make the reader believe in God, per se, I would agree with that, but, for me, the ending suggests that, despite the bleak state of nature in the middle of Winter, there is always the Hope of a Spring redemption.

I’ll have to deal with GPT’s argument that “Hardy’s Historical Position Makes the ‘Hopeful’ Reading Unlikely” in my next blog entry because I’m still figuring out why I didn’t see Hardy as overly pessimistic.

When You Disagree with ChatGPT

Ever since I discovered that ChatGPT would analyze a poem, I can’t resist pasting in a poem I want to comment on and seeing what GPT has to say about it.  Usually, I learn something that I hadn’t thought of myself.  When I asked ChatGPT to compare McNulty’s “Varied Thrush Calling in Autumn” and Thomas Hardy’s “The Darkling Thrush.” I definitely learned something that I hadn’t thought of myself, but this time I was NOT happy with GPT’s interpretation.

GPT argues that a “Varied Thrush Calling in Autumn” and Thomas Hardy’s “The Darkling Thrush” “… share a bird, a season, and an atmosphere of historical darkness—but they use those elements in very different ways” and then goes into considerable detail on why it sees it this way. Most importantly, it argues that Hardy’s poem projects despair while McNulty’s projects “grounded hope.”

1. The Bird as Symbol: Despair vs. Grounded Hope

Hardy:

The thrush appears suddenly in a bleak, exhausted world:

• Frost is “spectre-grey”

• The land is “the Century’s corpse outleant”

• Everything signals cultural, moral, and personal decline

The bird’s song is unexpected and irrational—Hardy ends by admitting he himself cannot believe in its “Some blessed Hope.”

The bird’s joy is mysterious, almost naïve.

Hardy’s thrush = irrational hope in a hopeless world.

It is a contrast to the landscape, not a result of it.

McNulty:

McNulty’s thrush, by contrast, grows organically out of its world:

• Autumn

• Cold

• A “tense wind”

• A season “darkening with war”

Yet the bird’s “single pure note” forms “a broad wingshape of hope.”

Hope isn’t irrational or naive—it’s an outgrowth of attention, art, and the natural world.

McNulty’s thrush = grounded, perceptual hope emerging naturally from darkness.

While I’d generally agree with GPT’s interpretation of McNulty’s use of the Varied Thrush’s single pure note, I definitely don’t agree with GPT’s interpretation of Hardy’s Thrush.  The song may well be “unexpected,” but I don’t see any evidence that Hardy sees it as irrational. In fact, since Hardy has shown in several other poems that he sympathized with small animals, show by these lines from “Afterwards:”

“He strove that such innocent creatures should/ come to no harm/ But he could do little for them; and now he is gone.”

In fact, he seemed proud of how aware he was of his surroundings — as made clear in the last stanza of this famous poem:

And will any say when my bell of quittance is heard in the gloom,/ And a crossing breeze cuts a pause in its outrollings,/ Till they rise again, as they were a new bell’s boom,/”He hears it not now, but used to notice such things?

No one who notices “such things” is going to find it “irrational” that a Thrush would be singing in January. I certainly don’t find it irrational when I hear a Varied Thrush singing in Winter, or a Marsh Wren for that matter. 

Although GPT sees the poem’s setting as bleaker than I originally did, I can understand why they see it that way.  

2. Tone: Bleakness vs. Quiet Resilience

Hardy:

Bleakness dominates the poem.

Hardy’s speaker is depressed, isolated, and skeptical:

“I could think there trembled through

His happy good-night air

Some blessed Hope…

But I was unaware.”

Hope is possible but unreachable; the speaker can’t receive it.

McNulty:

The tone is quiet, reflective, and receptive.

The world is still darkening, but the speaker is open to meaning. The poem closes gently, not with a skeptical shrug:

“the quiet flight of music

sweetened

by the coming cold.”

Hardy ends with distance.

McNulty ends with integration.

Perhaps at 18, I didn’t see the landscape Hardy describes as depressing as others might.  I live in the Pacific Northwest, and Winters here are dominated by gray skies and drizzle for months at a time.  People who have moved here from sunnier climes often complain about how dark/gray it is here, but I find it rather peaceful, even meditative when I’m out walking or hiking, certainly not depressing.  

Furthermore, I saw the bleakness of the first two stanzas more as a contrast to the last two stanzas than as an attempt to argue that the Thrush’s optimism is “unreachable.”  The fact that the aged thrush, is  “frail, gaunt, and small/In blast-beruffled plume” suggests to me that it is not some naive, young Thrush looking for first love, but a mature thrush that has experienced life’s hardships but can still find Hope in the upcoming Spring.  

Raised as a city boy, I’m really not sure how I felt about Nature when I read this poem, though I think I was aware that Hardy’s portrayal of it was harsh and unforgiving, particularly in Tess of the D’Urbervilles. At this point in my life, it’s clear that I identify more with McNulty’s view than I do Hardy’s view:

3. Relationship to the Natural World

Hardy:

Nature is symbolic—almost allegorical.

The landscape mirrors the speaker’s internal despair.

McNulty:

Nature is ecological, embodied.

It is not a mirror of the self; it interacts with the human mind but does not simply represent it. The bird is part of a web: wind, season, cold, brushstrokes, and attention.

Hardy separates the human mind from nature.

McNulty unites them.

It’s clear that at the beginning of the poem Hardy’s narrator is depressed by the world he sees, and that depression colors how he sees nature, mirroring his internal despair as seen in the lines: “The land’s sharp features seemed to be/ The Century’s corpse outleant,/ His crypt the cloudy canopy/ The wind his death-lament…”  I think that’s natural; it’s hard to remember how magnificent Mt. Rainier looks even on a sunny day when you’re experiencing personal problems.  I’m not sure that Hardy meant nature is symbolic, much less allegorical.

Those are just three points of comparison ChatGPT makes, but they seem like the most important. I’m not going to belabor all of them, but here’s an Overall Summary of the differences between the two poems:

AspectHardyMcNulty
Moodbleak, skepticalquiet, receptive
Hopeirrational, unreachablegrounded, discoverable
Bird’s songexuberantminimal, pure
Naturesymbolic of human despairecological, integrated
Artobserves despairshapes hope
Endingunresolved, doubtfulgentle acceptance

Both poems ask whether beauty can matter in dark times.
Hardy’s answer: maybe, but I can’t feel it.
McNulty’s answer: yes, but quietly and attentively.

Unhappy with this interpretation, I tried for nearly 25 pages, 7000+ words to convince ChatGPT that its interpretation was wrong.  

This entry is already too, too long, though, so I’ll start with this and post more comments shortly — I hope.

I’m afraid that at some point this exchange illustrates my stubbornness and doubts about ChatGPT rather than merely comparing of these two poems.

Hardy’s Novels and Poetry Have Special Meaning to Me

I’m pretty sure I’ve told parts of this story here several times in the past, but what I have to say about falling into the black hole of AI poetry analysis probably won’t make sense without knowing my background with Hardy’s poem. 

I was taking a semester-long Senior English class that was advertised as an honors class for students who had high scores on their SATs but lower scores in the writing portion of the exam.  When I went to the office and asked why I wasn’t in the regular honors English class since I’d gotten “A’s” in all my English classes, they told me that I could be in the regular honors class if I wanted, but would need better writing skills if I wanted to succeed in college. Somewhat appeased by that explanation, I begrudgingly entered Mr. Thomas’s “bonehead Honors” class.

For better or worse, it turned out to be the most influential class of my life. First, it revealed that — though I often had good insights —I didn’t have a clue how to organize my thoughts.  I don’t think I’d ever seen an outline before, and I certainly didn’t know how to use one to write my own papers. I’d never used notecards before this class. In other words, the class itself focused on writing, not literature. Except for Calculus (an everlasting disaster), it was the toughest class I ever took, and the INTP in me loved it.  

We had to write a paper outside of class, and I chose Thomas Hardy as my subject, although I had no idea who Thomas Hardy was. I read three of his novels: Return of the Native, Tess of the D’Urbervilles, Jude the Obscure, and a short collection of his poems for my paper. I had never explored a writer in such depth before. More importantly, I had never read one who portrayed life so critically. 

I had read a lot in my life (we didn’t have a TV until I was in Junior High, and my parents were voracious readers). My mother bought the family an encyclopedia when I was in 4th or 5th grade, which included a collection of classic novels that had apparently been bowdlerized for young kids. After I finished those, my mother would suggest classics I should check out from the library — most of which I don’t remember, probably because they seemed to have little or nothing to do with me.  After all, I never wanted or expected to be part of English upper society, though I’ll admit to being a bit of a sucker for My Friend Flicka and Thunderhead. In other words, almost everything I had read or been exposed to up to that point offered a Romantic/Optimistic/childish view of life. The only novels I had read in high school that were nearly as pessimistic/realistic as Hardy were How Green Was My Valley and A Tree Grows in Brooklyn.

Perhaps Hardy resonated because I was beginning to realize that my own opportunities in life weren’t so grand as I had once been led to believe.  Though some colleges like Harvey Mudd recruited me, there was no way my parents or I could afford the tuition there, even with a scholarship. It never even occurred to me that I could take out a student loan; we weren’t those kinds of people. Even attending the University of Washington, the local college, was going to be a challenge and meant I would have to work at least part-time to afford it.

 I was fascinated by Hardy’s novels, so fascinated that I switched from a Physics Major to an English Major when I entered the University of Washington months later. Of course, I’d always been more interested in seeking Truth than following a particular career. So, perhaps this wasn’t such a momentous decision. Jude the Obscure made the biggest impression on me because it seemed most relevant to my personal life and the decisions I faced. In fact, before I read Catch-22 many years later, after serving in Vietnam, Jude was my favorite novel. 

Unfortunately,by now I have only vague memories of Hardy’s novels, even Jude, but I memorized “The Darkling Thrush:” 

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.

and it has stayed with me for my whole life, not because it is depressing, but because it seems to offer Hope even in the face of a bleak world. In fact, for years, I would post it to this site on New Year’s Day in hopes that the next year would be a better one.

Or, at least, that was my interpretation until I compared it to McNulty’s “Varied Thrush Calling in Autumn” inChat GPT, which gave a very different interpretation to the poem, no matter how hard I tried to convince it otherwise.  

Tim McNulty’s Ascendance

With rare exceptions, I seldom know when I bought a book that I’ve finally picked up to read. Surprisingly, I remember when and why I purchased Tim McNulty’s Ascendence.  I bought it in February 2023  because an environmental group I belong to was promoting him as a guide for a trip on the Olympic Peninsula.  I prefer to explore the Olympics on my own and have been doing so for nearly 60 years, but I was surprised that I had never heard of McNulty and wondered what he had to say about an area I love.  

I identified with many of his poems particularly those where he describes his daughter Caitlin’s experiences in the woods.  One of my fondest memories is my first backpacking trip with my kids in Olympic National Park. Dawn insisted I was trying to kill her when we got to a crossing point too late, and the high tide made it difficult to cross; she wasn’t any happier when we had to climb a ridge using a rope to pull us up one side and lower us slowly on the other side.  Tyson just plain didn’t want to carry his own sleeping bag, so I ended up with it on the top of my pack, hitting me in the head every other step.  Still, neither complained when the deer wandered into our camp the next morning to say hello and when we saw a pod of Orcas just off the shore. Those kinds of experiences bind you forever.

I thought about quoting one of those poems here because I did like them so much, but decided that “Varied Thrush Calling in Autumn”resonated even more deeply.  McNulty is reacting to a painting by Morris Graves, as he points out in “Notes to the Poems”.  Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to find a link to that particular painting anywhere on the net, though there are a lot of Morris’s bird paintings online.  McNulty points out that it was painted at the outbreak of World War II, just before Morris’s internment as a conscientious objector.   

The poem reminded me a lot of Thomas Hardy’s “The Darkling Thrush,” which was written in 1900, just as Europe was moving towards World War I. As I’ve mentioned before, this poem made me change my college major from Physics to English.

The Varied Thrush happens to be one of my favorite birds, one that spends Summer high in the Cascades or the Olympics —and, hopefully, Winter in my backyard searching for insects in the leaves I’ve piled up for it.

“VARIED THRUSH CALLING IN AUTUMN” 

It may not be entirely relevant in this poem. Still, anyone familiar with the Varied Thrush would know that its brilliant orange-and black-plumage would contrast with the “dark-washed” browns in the landscape almost as much as its brilliant song contrasts with the natural silence of the wilderness.  

For me, the poem, like the drawing that inspired it, captures a moment of beauty in a world that is definitely not always so, never more so than in a time of war, whether it be World War II or the Vietnam War.  

Luckily, such opportunities to discover beauty are not limited to times of war; they are available to anyone willing to venture forth in Nature, not just in Spring when Nature is at its loveliest, but even in late Fall when it’s so cold that even the birds begin to retreat to the lowlands.

The poem shows that small moments in the natural world can stabilize us, deepen us, and remind us how to endure tension without despairing.