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.