An aged thrush, frail, gaunt, and small,
In blast-beruffled plume.

These lines come from Thomas Hardy’s lyric “The Darkling Thrush,” written at the turn of the twentieth century and first published in 1900. The poem is set in a bleak winter landscape at dusk, with the speaker contemplating a sense of cultural and personal exhaustion often associated with fin-de-siècle pessimism. Against this desolate backdrop, Hardy introduces an unexpectedly singing thrush—described here as old, physically diminished, and battered by the weather—whose song interrupts the speaker’s gloom. The contrast between the bird’s frailty and its outpouring of “joy” is central to the poem’s mood and argument.

Hardy’s description emphasizes the thrush’s age and vulnerability (“frail, gaunt, and small,” with wind-ruffled feathers), making its song feel improbable rather than triumphant. The bird becomes a figure of stubborn, inexplicable vitality: hope (or at least song) arising from a body and world that seem to have no reason for it. By stressing the thrush’s battered physicality, Hardy avoids sentimental nature symbolism; the speaker does not claim to understand the source of the bird’s “ecstatic sound.” The lines thus prepare the poem’s larger tension between a rational, despondent observer and a sudden, mysterious intimation of meaning or renewal.