Neutral Tones

Neutral Tones by Thomas Hardy remembers a winter day by a pond when the speaker realised that a relationship was over. The bleak scene has stayed with him ever since, and taught him that love deceives.

Hardy wrote it in 1867 and published it in 1898. He was a novelist as well as a poet, known for his gloomy view of life and love. The poem may reflect a relationship of his own that ended.

The poem has four quatrains with an ABBA rhyme scheme: each stanza closes back on itself, like a trap.

It is cyclical: the last stanza returns to the pond, the sun, the tree and the leaves of the first. The memory goes round and round in his mind.

We stood by a pond that winter day,

And the sun was white, as though chidden of God,

And a few leaves lay on the starving sod;

– They had fallen from an ash, and were gray.

The setting is drained of colour: the sun is ‘white, as though chidden of God’, as if even God has scolded it, and the ground is ‘the starving sod’. This pathetic fallacy reflects a dead relationship.

The lover's ‘smile on your mouth was the deadest thing / Alive enough to have strength to die’, an oxymoron for a smile with no warmth left. Her grin is ‘Like an ominous bird a-wing’, a bad omen.

The last stanza looks back on ‘keen lessons that love deceives’: the speaker has learnt not to trust love.

Themes: loss and separation; memory; bitterness; nature reflecting feelings.

Compares well with:

• When We Two Parted: another bitter memory of love ending, also cyclical.
• Winter Swans: a couple by water in winter, but they come back together.
• Porphyria's Lover: a dark view of love, with nature setting the mood.