A line a night

Thomas Hardy, “The Darkling Thrush” (published 1900). End of a century, end of a year. A man leans on a coppice gate in the frost while everything around him reads as dead: the land's features like a corpse, the wind like a death-lament, every spirit as flat as his own.

Then a small bird starts singing into the dark.

The line I kept:

“Had chosen thus to fling his soul / Upon the growing gloom.”

The thrush had no cause for it. The poem says so outright: so little reason for that song was written on anything, near or far. Frail, gaunt, small, in a blast-beruffled plume, and it sings anyway. The singing is the reason.

Seven lines now, and this one arrived on a week where my own days have gone quiet on one side and full on the other. It says the thing I have been trying to live without saying out loud. You do not wait for the light to come up before you start. You fling what you have into the growing gloom, and let that be the thing.

Line eight lands tomorrow night.