The Year’s Awakening: A Poem by Thomas Hardy

A “Spring poem” written in 1910

Thomas Hardy’s poem “The Year’s Awakening” was published in his 1914 collection entitled “Satires of Circumstance, Lyrics and Remedies”. It is dated February 1910. It comprises two stanzas of ten lines each, in the form of rhyming couplets.

Each stanza opens and closes with the words “How do you know?” so that the poem expresses a sense of wonder at the changes that are happening with the onset of spring. Only in the ninth line of each stanza is the reader made aware of the thing being addressed, which adds to the sense of mystery.

First Stanza

How do you know that the pilgrim track
Along the belting zodiac
Swept by the sun in his seeming rounds
Is traced by now to the Fishes’ bounds
And into the Ram, when weeks of cloud
Have wrapt the sky in a clammy shroud,
And never as yet a tinct of spring
Has shown in the Earth’s apparelling;
O vespering bird, how do you know,
How do you know?

The first five lines sound like a direct reference to the opening of the General Prologue of…