Please explain the following lines from "The Darkling Thrush" by Thomas Hardy: "The ancient pulse of germ and birth / Was shrunken hard and dry."

This is perhaps one of Hardy's most well-known poems. It
describes the speaker of the poem looking out across a barren, wooden landscape on one
cold evening in winter. The sudden hopeful song of an aged thrush, however, causes him
to question his pessimistic mood and the hope that he is not aware
of.

The lines you have selected are part of the second
stanza which paints a series of funereal images describing the landscape that the poet
contemplates:

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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.

Note how this stanza
supports the bleak landscape that the poet contemplates in stanza 1: the words used and
images created help us think that the landscape itself is dead and barren, just as the
poet's perspective is barren and joyless. Consider the choice of diction of words such
as "corpse", "crypt" and "death-lament". The lines you have selected establish and build
upon this repression by referring to Nature as "the ancient pulse of germ and birth" -
the force that gives and sustains life, but which is now "shrunken hard and dry", thus
supporting and sustaining the pessimistic, joyless mood of the
poet.

What is key to understanding this presentation of
nature is that Hardy shows in this poem that Nature is an arena of bleak struggle and
conflict without plan or purpose, but also that paradoxical it is also a site of
astonishing creativity.