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.

These lines come from Thomas Hardy’s poem “The Darkling Thrush,” written at the turn of the twentieth century and first published in 1900. The speaker stands outdoors on a bleak winter evening, surveying a landscape that seems emblematic of exhaustion and decline, a mood often linked to fin-de-siècle anxieties and Hardy’s characteristic pessimism about human prospects. Against this desolate backdrop, an aged thrush unexpectedly sings with “ecstatic sound.” The quoted stanza records the speaker’s bafflement: nothing in the surrounding world appears to warrant such joy, so the song seems to carry a hope the bird possesses but the speaker cannot access.

Hardy contrasts external desolation with an inexplicable eruption of song to dramatize the limits of human perception and the precariousness of hope. The speaker’s rational assessment—there is “so little cause” for celebration—cannot account for the thrush’s rapture, so he imagines a “blessed hope” passing through the bird’s “good-night air.” The stanza holds hope at a distance: it is not embraced as certainty, but registered as a possibility that exists beyond the speaker’s knowledge. The effect is poignantly modern: consolation appears, yet remains unverified, highlighting Hardy’s tension between skepticism and a yearning for meaning.