"The Darkling Thrush" is a new composition by Rachel Portman, commissioned by King’s College in Cambridge. The composition is a 5-minute carol and its premiere performance will take place on Christmas Eve 2025 as part of the world-famous 'A Festival of Nine Lessons and Carols' at the chapel of King's College. The event will be broadcast live on BBC Radio 4 and the BBC World Service on the 24th of December at 15:00 GMT. In the United States the service is distributed by American Public Media and is broadcast by over 400 radio stations, including Minnesota Public Radio and WQXR in New York.

'A Festival of Nine Lessons and Carols' is a yearly service at the chapel of King's College in Cambridge that for many marks the beginning of Christmas. It was first held at on Christmas Eve 1918, first broadcast in 1928 and is now broadcast to millions of people worldwide. Since 1983 a new carol has been commissioned for the service every year, with this year's contribution by Rachel Portman.

The composition "The Darkling Thrush" is based on a poem by Thomas Hardy which was written around 1900. As Rachel Portman explained: “I chose Thomas Hardy’s The Darkling Thrush to set as a carol because it’s about faith in renewal. It was first suggested to me by my daughter who’d studied Hardy’s poems. I needed to find a text to sit within the Festival of Nine Lessons and Carols at King’s and initially I was unsure it would be appropriate, however when the same poem was suggested by Laura Davies from the English Faculty at King’s, I looked again and discovered much in the words to set. I was particularly drawn to its deep rural setting, beginning as it does in the cold winter landscape, and the uplifting song of the little bird that bursts out upon the stillness bringing hope. The thrush’s song in the poem is given to a solo chorister, and the choir responds in growing warmth and melody. The poignancy of a frail thrush’s song as the bringer of hope into the world is, I feel, a good message for our time."

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.