Cold whittles the bird population down. By December, all that remain are the clean-up crew — hawks, owls, buzzards — the noisemakers — crows, jays, woodpeckers — and the winter flock of dusky little ones. Thomas Hardy wrote a poem about a year-end encounter with a wintry bird, “The Darkling Thrush.”
A number of eminent Victorians left the faith of their birth, a few for Rome, more for nothing. Hardy fled to a very dour faith — in an often malicious Fate, working through the iron laws of Nature. His creed both enabled and hobbled his genius, giving his novels and poems gravity while tugging them into rigid patterns. Sometimes he stacked the deck so grossly, he stumbled into unintended humor: The suicide of the starving children in Jude the Obscure is the atheist’s death of Little Nell. At other times, even at his hokiest, the reader’s snark dies in the mouth: “The Convergence of the Twain,” about the predestined meeting of an ocean liner and an iceberg, would be almost a Hammer film if it were not taken from the headlines of April 15, 1912.
Read Full Article »