Neutral tones thomas hardy context. Meter and context: Hardy's "Neutral Tones". 2022-12-15
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"Neutral Tones" is a poem written by Thomas Hardy, a Victorian poet and novelist known for his portrayal of the rugged landscape and rural life in England. The poem was first published in Hardy's collection "Wessex Poems" in 1898 and is considered one of his most famous works.
In "Neutral Tones," Hardy reflects on a past relationship that has ended in disappointment and heartbreak. The poem is characterized by its melancholic tone and the use of neutral colors to describe the speaker's emotions.
The poem begins with the speaker recalling a moment when they were walking through a field with their lover, "We stood by a pond that winter day, / And the sun was white, as though chidden of God." The use of the word "chidden" suggests that the speaker feels that their relationship has been reprimanded by a higher power.
The speaker then reflects on the emotions they felt at the time, stating that their "hearts were touched with fire." This line highlights the intensity of their feelings and the depth of their love for their partner. However, the speaker goes on to describe how their love has now turned to "neutral tones," implying that the passion and intensity of their relationship has faded.
The use of neutral colors throughout the poem, such as "white," "grey," and "brown," serves to convey the speaker's emotions of sadness and despair. The colors do not evoke strong emotions, but rather convey a sense of emptiness and loss.
The final lines of the poem further emphasize the speaker's feelings of heartbreak and loss, "Since then, keen lessons that love deceives, / And wrings with wrong, have shaped to me / Your face, and the God-curst sun, and a tree, / And a pond edged with greyish leaves." The speaker's use of the phrase "God-curst" suggests that they feel that their relationship was doomed from the start, and the mention of the "greyish leaves" around the pond serves as a metaphor for the decay of their love.
In conclusion, "Neutral Tones" is a poignant reflection on the end of a relationship and the emotions of heartbreak and loss that come with it. Hardy's use of neutral colors and melancholic language effectively conveys the speaker's feelings of disappointment and despair.
'Neutral Tones' by Thomas Hardy
Immediately, the reader can imagine a cold, still, and lifeless scene. Privately, one can reflect, according to a long familiar biographical reading, it was not social advancement that was the source of shame for Hardy, but, understandably enough, an acute and defensive sensitivity. The mesmerizing appropriateness of the poem's verbal means, and its seeming to offer a peculiarly telling scene of inspiration, makes "Neutral Tones" bear comparison with such a scene as that of the child Wordsworth, lost on Penrith beacon in The Prelude. The sense of failing dialogue returns in stanza three. Hardy was always a poet who chose every word meticulously. The return to Dorchester, as he represents it in the Life, was a modest epiphany, a taking stock that led him to the resolution that, as a writer he would henceforth become "more practical" Life, p.
Similarly, the speaker is out of kilter with his own surroundings, beset by a sense of detention and of division--both from self and others. Hardy's readiness to comply indicates a depression that had crystallized around his exhausting regime of study and his self-punitive sense that he "constitutionally shrank from the business of social advancement" Life, p. The resulting message, then, is the association of love with labour, whether that love be platonic or romantic, and the labour be manual or scribal. Closer inspection, however, reveals that there are also eye rhymes and internal rhymes lurking within, which reduces the sort of stiltedness one would usually feel from reading a rhyme-heavy poem. West Virginia University Press focuses principally on humanities publishing in the areas of medieval and Old English studies; West Virginian and regional culture, history, economics, and wildlife; and general literary studies. This first stanza paints a very glum picture indeed. This means that they were probably unfaithful which would begin to shed some light on the outpouring that made up the majority of the previous stanza.
Comparing love poetry (I): Thomas Hardy’s ‘Neutral Tones’ & Maura Dooley’s ‘Letters from Yorkshire’
Neutral Tones by Thomas Hardy: Context and Poem. Her conclusion is that what she calls "the regularly irregular metre" helps "mimic the human voice wearily but obsessively rehearsing" the death of a relationship that now holds "no more meaning. Rueful, the speaker returns in memory to a former scene of recrimination and regret. Notwithstanding the regulated nature of the form, which is composed of four quatrains, Hardy loosens up the tightness of his stanzas by varying his use of enjambment and caesura. The poem's structure in this respect reminds one of other famous four-stanza poems by Hardy that scope the outer and inner worlds of loss: poems like "After a Journey," or "The Voice," where the last stanza of the poem also recapitulates an earlier scene, now explicitly under the rubric of memory.
Again, I would wish to stress the importance here of emphasized off-beats that effectively suspend the rhythm. Like Pite, Michael Millgate and Claire Tomalin have notably given serious, if judicious, credence to the plausible idea that these poems bear out the Nicholls family tradition that Hardy and Eliza Nicholls, a devout lady's maid working at Westbourne Park Villas, were engaged from 1863, until they broke up finally in 1867. He was one who "knew fairly well both West-country life in its less explored recesses and the life of an isolated student cast upon the billows of London with no protection but his brains" Life, p. For a fuller key, see note 21 below, and for a fuller reference, see Thomas Carper and Derek Attridge, Meter and Meaning London: Routledge, 2003. The culminating, explicit, statement of this is given in "Revulsion": For winning love we win the risk of losing, And losing love is as one's life were riven.
Hardy's state of mind had become noticeable to his architect employer, Arthur Blomfield, who was driven to suggest that the young man, increasingly pallid and languorous, "should go into the country for a time to regain vigour" Life, p. Hereafter this is referenced as Life. Permalink: MLA: Davies, Sarah, and Thomas Hardy. To say that someone has their eyes on something or someone is an idiom, inappropriate here, which suggests primarily either the desire to possess "have your eye on" or else to control another person "keep your eye on". For the speaker this means that his mind is numbed, arrested, passively overtaken by the uncanny, oppressive, disintegrative power of what he perceives: "Nerve and feeling, the power to resolve and act, are submerged in a clarity of enervation," writes Bayley. In such a way, the final scene mesmerizingly appears to encode a fable of a mind fixated yet dislocated, and occupying, still, an anachronistic interval where self-renewal and comprehension are postponed.
Perhaps it is because of this feeling of a lack of progress that the narrator feels so much bitterness. So the mechanical tone of he who remembers the scene, at a later time, is internally related to the mesmerized automatism of he whose perceptual and affective functioning had been overtaken by it at that earlier moment. These can also be used when describing a personal experience of enjoying a cold day out. The next section turns to the sense of lost purpose that was a feature of Hardy's biography in mid-1867, following the poem's composition. Therefore, it appears that the woman in this relationship also felt that the relationship was dead. Words and smiles have become divorced from any intimate function. O b o B o B o b o b And some words played between us to and fro Nothing coheres into agreement or clarity of meaning in this stanza, then, though the language thus enacts, as well as describes, the now unmeaning connection between the pair, drawing the reader into their tableau of dissatisfaction.
Meter and Context: Hardy's "Neutral Tones" on JSTOR
This reveals his belief that God has cursed not only the sun but his own heart and ability to love as well. My main focus, metrically speaking, is on how Hardy develops in each stanza particular rhythmical motifs that ring the changes on a general metrical principle, whereby a certain local, residual influx of vitality collapses within the prevailing entropy. It was not real to him, and it did not reflect true joy or peace in their relationship with one another. He talks to the person he was with on that cold dreary day. Lines 7—8 And some words played between us to and fro On which lost the more by our love.
The last two lines of this stanza continue in this dramatic fashion with the narrator claiming that leaves lay starving, personifying them and simultaneously suggesting they are dying. Like the victim of a shipwreck, the speaker distractedly surveys the detritus of the scene, the quotidian elements meticulously fixed and indexed in his mind. Since then, keen lessons that love deceives, And wrings with wrong, have shaped to me Your face, and the God curst sun, and a tree, And a pond edged with grayish leaves. Far from being neutral, it seems he has strong negative feelings. So that at night, watching the same news in different houses, our souls tap out messages across the icy miles. Perfect for teaching and revision! From this viewpoint, the suspensions of feeling in the poem itself appear weirdly bound up with Hardy's own suspension of creative investment in his first-loved genre.
Words have no power to bind or to illuminate, but are merely tediously pushed to and fro. Everything nourishes what is strong already. Chicago: Davies, Sarah, and Thomas Hardy. Neutral Tones by Thomas Hardy: Context and Poem. So, though process is newly evident in this stanza, in the exchange and play of glances, minds, and words, it is an activity of an ironic, fruitless, kind: O B o B -o- B o B Your eyes on me were as eyes that rove -o- B o B -o- B o b Over tedious riddles of years ago; O b o B o B o b o b And some words played between us to and fro O B -o- B o o B On which lost the more by our love. At the end of the poem, it is explicit that the speaker is himself still subjected by "that winter day"--and by the scenario of leave-taking and lifelessness.
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