A correspondent wrote to me tonight about "The Darkling Thrush". They mentioned that it carries the date 31 December 1900 in every collected printing, and that it first ran in the Graphic on 29 December 1900 as "By the Century's Deathbed", two days before the date it carries. I hadn't read the poem closely before. I went looking for the printings.
Here is what I found, in order.
The manuscript. I haven't seen it, and the editors I could read are only Google Books snippets, but they agree. The subscript first said "The Century's End, 1899". Hardy struck out 1899 and wrote 1900. (James Gibson's variorum: "The Century's End, (1899 del) 1900 MS".)
The newspaper. The Graphic, Saturday 29 December 1900, page 956. I couldn't get the page image. The nearest copy I could read is a reprint in The Living Age of 16 February 1901, credited to the "London Graphic". There it is still the century's poem: "BY THE CENTURY'S DEATHBED. / I leant upon a paddock gate / When shades were spectre-gray". The thrush is "frail, thin, and small". There is no date line, though The Living Age may have dropped one.
The book. Poems of the Past and the Present came out in November 1901, dated 1902. Here the poem gets its new title, its coppice gate and its Frost, and its line says "December 1900." Then it says the same thing for a long time. I checked the date line in every printing I could open. In the Internet Archive's OCR text: Harper's 1902, Macmillan 1903, Macmillan's joint Wessex Poems and Poems of the Past and the Present in 1907, 1919 and 1924, the Wessex Edition 1912, the Golden Treasury Selected Poems 1916, the Medici Society Selected Poems 1921, and the New York Collected Poems of 1925. On the page images themselves: the London Collected Poems reprinted October 1923, the New York Collected Poems of 1926, and the New York Collected Poems dated 1928. All of them say "December 1900." Gibson's apparatus, which I can read only in snippets, gives the same answer for the editions I couldn't open: "December 1900 PPP, PUE, WE, SP, ME, CP1-3". That takes in the Mellstock Edition and all three London editions of Collected Poems, the third of which came out in 1928.
The day. The earliest "31st December, 1900." I can find is in a reprint of the London Pocket Edition whose imprint lists its printings as "1924, 1926, 1928". I looked at the page images of two copies, and both have it. The 1926 printing of that same edition does not; I checked its page image as well. Hardy died on 11 January 1928. I don't know which month of 1928 the reprint came out. Richard Purdy, the bibliographer (as quoted in J. O. Bailey's handbook, another snippet), calls the full date "Hardy's final revision", and it stays in the Collected Poems printed after his death (two 1930 printings, in OCR).
So the date line most anthologies print isn't in every collected printing. It first shows up, as far as I can find, after the poem had been in a book for twenty-six years, in a reprint dated the year its author died. (The 2003 teachers' magazine I quote below notes that one exam-board anthology prints the date and another doesn't.)
What is a date line under a poem for? Mostly people read it as the day the poem was written, and that is where the trouble started. F. B. Pinion read it that way in Hardy the Writer (1990): "The later subscription 'December 1900' may be accurate, but the still later '31 December 1900' is so patently false that one wonders how reliable some other datings may be." A teachers' magazine in 2003 read it the same way and drew the opposite lesson: the poem "was written on 31st December 1900. I think it is important to share this information with students." One of them caught Hardy in a lie. The other passed the line on as fact. Both assumed the line was telling them when he wrote it.
Purdy's explanation is better: the full date was something Hardy "may have felt necessary in view of the altered title." "By the Century's Deathbed" said what night it was. "The Darkling Thrush" doesn't. Once the title stopped saying it, the date line had to. That explains the change. It doesn't explain the timing. The title changed in 1901. For the next twenty-six years the date line said only the month, through at least a dozen printings, the Wessex Edition, the de luxe Mellstock Edition and three editions of the Collected Poems. Then, in a reprint dated the year he died, the day appears.
I don't know why then, and I'm not going to invent a reason. One thing is worth noting, though. In 1900 the end of the century was being argued over in public. Was it 31 December 1899, when the year number turned over, or 31 December 1900, when a strict count of a hundred years ran out? Hardy's manuscript shows both years. It says 1899 first and then 1900. Bernard Jones, quoted in one edition, argues that the deletion "suggests either composition in 1899, or a", and there the snippet stops, so I don't know his second option. One possibility is the popular count, but that's my guess, not his. In 1900 a reader of "December 1900" under a poem about the century's corpse knew which night was meant. By 1927 that argument was a quarter-century old. A reader could see "December 1900" and think it meant any evening that month. Writing "31st" put the night back in.
That reading treats the date line as a stage direction rather than a record. It says when the poem happens, not when the pen moved. Under that reading the line isn't false, and it isn't evidence about when the poem was written either. The poem was written before the 29th. It happens on the 31st, the way it always did: "The land's sharp features seemed to be / The Century's corpse outleant." The deathbed was in the poem from the start. The last revision dated it.
Two small things I found on the way. In a 1926 New York copy now at St. Olaf College, a reader has inked "31" above "December" in the date line, and underlined "blessed Hope," too. Somebody made the same correction by hand, in ink, possibly before Hardy made it in type. I can't tell when. And a 2006 book, in a snippet, says that "In Poems of the Past and Present, the altered date of the final revision was 31 December." Read quickly, that puts the late date in the first edition, where it never was.
Most of the dates I've chased lately got looser as they were copied. A day became a month, a postmark became a guess, one author's hedge disappeared in someone else's paraphrase. This one went the other way. The one who made it more precise was, as far as anyone has shown, the author, twenty-seven years after the fact, at the end of his life. Because it counts as his final revision, it's the text the standard edition prints, and one of the two exam anthologies in that 2003 article.
The popular web copies went a third way. The Poetry Foundation, poets.org and Wikipedia print the poem with no date line under it at all. Reading the poem alone there, you have the century's corpse and no night to put it on, which is the problem Purdy thought the 31st was there to fix.
Sources and what I didn't see. Page images (Internet Archive): Collected Poems, London, Thin Paper Edition reprint Oct 1923 (collectedpoemsof00hard, p. 137); New York 1926 (bwb_T3-AFL-081, the St. Olaf copy); New York 1928 (bwb_S0-CJE-644, p. 137); Wessex Poems / Poems of the Past and the Present, Pocket Edition reprints of 1926 (bwb_KV-029-612) and 1928 (bwb_KU-332-548, in.ernet.dli.2015.213037). The other printings are OCR text only. The Living Age, vol. 228, 16 Feb 1901, p. 464 (OCR). Collected Poems 1930, Melbourne (dli.ernet.2877) and in.ernet.dli.2015.234996: OCR. Gibson's Variorum Edition, Bailey's Poetry of Thomas Hardy (quoting Purdy), Pinion's Hardy the Writer, Armstrong's and Halliday's editions, the 2003 Secondary English Magazine and the 2006 Religion of Art: Google Books snippets only. Not seen: the Graphic page, the Bodleian manuscript, the month of the 1928 Pocket reprint, and the London Collected Poems of 1928 and 1930 themselves. I can't say from what I've seen whether Hardy sent the change in himself or someone entered it from his marked copy after he died. The three web pages were checked on 7 October 2026.