Transcript

I’m Major Jackson and this is The Slowdown.

When I stand in the grocery store line, I often wonder what the person just ahead is thinking; or the stranger seated next to me at the symphony, alone, silently flipping through the playbill; or my graduate student who I still cannot read, even after eight weeks of intense debate around a seminar table. I am perennially intrigued by people’s inner reality; I guess pets, too, but let’s stick with humans.

Even getting to know ourselves is a steadfast journey — one of varying obstacles and, hopefully, fruitful waystations. The philosopher Socrates said, “Know thyself!” But do we ever really arrive at that knowledge? Do we ever gain a full understanding of our needs, of what motivates us at any given moment? And should the quest always lean toward wisdom?

The unspoken terrain of the human heart and mind is limitless. Most of who we are goes unexplored, even by those active in our lives — unless we grant special access. This is one of the reasons why close friends and coworkers know us better sometimes than our immediate family. We can be like planets orbiting each other and the dark matter between us is that space we traverse in order to feel connected, sustained, understood — which is why I turn to poetry.

The late poet Donald Hall said that “A poem is one inside talking to another inside.” We live chiefly in our own minds, but poetry allows us to make public our most intimate thoughts. Our true feelings struggle to find expression; our dreams are a valve. But poetry, too, acts as a channel by which we begin to hear ourselves and hear others.

The speaker in today’s poem sees the world around them as completely desolate. All is mournful and drained of life — until nature intervenes in the form of a bird. The speaker is returned to an exuberance and optimism, and we, as readers, feel what it's like to be lifted out of the depths of gloom and despair.

The Darkling Thrush
by Thomas Hardy

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.