Poetry - Love and relationships

• Romantic love theme - Unrequited love: longing for a love that cannot be, or a love that is not returned (Farmer's Bride)
• Romantic love theme - Affairs, and forbidden love (Porphyria's lover)
• Romantic love theme - Desire (Sonnet 29, Letters from Yorkshire)
• Romantic love theme - Violence, or the threat of violence, in relationships (Porphyria's lover, The Farmer's Bride)
• Romantic love theme - Break-ups and the pain they cause (Neutral tones, When we two parted)
• Romantic love theme -Marriage: both happy and unhappy unisons (Singh Song!, Winter Swans)
• Further themes in romantic love poem :

  • Gender dynamics in relationships
  • The convention of marriage itself
  • Cultural or societal expectations of couples - or women - in relationships
  • Sex and consent
• Relationships within familial love poems:

  • A child and a parent
  • A child and a grandparent
  • A parent and a child
• Ideas that the familial love poets are exploring include:

  • The complicated nature of a parent-child relationship(Walking Away, Eden Rock)
  • The idea of a child becoming independent from their parent(Mother any distance)
  • Rebellion against a parent, or family culture (Before you were mine)
  • Admiration for a family member (Follower, Climbing my grandfather)
  • Regret for past behaviour in these family relationships
  • All poems are often very reflective, and involve ideas around memory or nostalgia
• Longing (familial love)

  Family relationships:

  • The parental longing for a child never to grow up and be independent
  • Longing for a better familial relationship
  • Longing for a family member, or members, who have died
• Longing (romantic love)

  Sexual desire

  • Unhealthy (male) desire and issues around sexual consent
  • This includes sexual consent within, and outside of, a marriage
  • Romantic fulfilment: a desire for happiness and contentment in a relationship
• Longing (relationship has ended)

  • Longing to be back with an former partner or lover
  • Longing to be closer (geographically) to a close friend
• Distance (physical)

  • Long-distance relationships, and a desire to be closer physically
  • The distance time creates when thinking about relationships
  • The distance that is created between a parent and a child as the child grows up:
  • The distance between parent and a child going to school
  • The distance involved when a child moves out of a family home
• Distance (figurative)

  • A growing distance between those in a relationship, especially a growing lack of intimacy
  • A growing distance between people after a relationship has ended
  • A growing distance between parents and their children
  • Some of big idea explored in terms of distance are nostalgia and memory, and the ideas of letting go and independence
• Ageing and Death

  • Coming to understand a relationship better over time
  • Missing a loved one
  • Longing for a relationship that can no longer exist
  • Power in relationships
  • The poets exploring these ideas are often very reflective, and involve ideas about memory, acceptance, or regret.
• Neutral Tones

  • A sombre poem that contemplates the final moments of a romantic relationship as told from the viewpoint of the speaker.
  • Tone: feelings of bitterness and resentment and it exemplifies how this loss can entirely alter an individual.
  • delves deep into the speaker’s sorrow and hopelessness as he reminisces over the fact that a relationship from his past had already come to an end long before its actual separation.
• Neutral tones- Form: 


  Theme: Loss

  Evidence: structured using quatrains and follows the traditional structure of an 'elegy'

  Intention: An elegy is a lamentation poem composed in memory of a departed companion or loved one, which links to one of the themes of the poem
• Neutral Tones- Structure:


  Theme: Memory

  Evidence: consists of four regular quatrains which are rhymed in an ABBA pattern

  Intention:

  • ABBA rhyme scheme in the poem suggests that the speaker is comforted by the constrained structure which enables him to convey his intense emotions in a more muted and controlled manner
  • reflects the writer's deliberate and measured reflections on the memory of his former relationship
  • regular and repetitive quatrains could also indicate that the memory has been replayed many times over in his thoughts
• Neutral Tones - Structure continued:

  Theme: Memory continued

  Evidence: Hardy employs an inconsistent rhythm throughout the poem

  Intention: This could be viewed as a reflection of their unsteady and tumultuous(disordered) relationship

  Evidence: poem uses a cyclical structure

  Intention:

  • Hardy returns the speaker to his melancholic, sombre state, by ending the poem with the speaker gazing at the pond
  • The circular structure mirrors the speaker’s reluctance to let go of his painful memory and could allude to the speaker’s inability to move forward
• Neutral Tones - structure continued:

  Theme: Bitterness

  Evidence: uses enjambment in the poem to increases its pace though he also slows it down by using caesura

  Intention: While the enjambement creates some release within the tight structure of the poem, the Caesurae almost leads to the creation of a suffocating and restricting tone and could signify a growing sense of anger

  Speaker is unable to completely free himself from the memory of his relationship
• Neutral tones- language:

  Theme: Memory

  Evidence: Hardy has written the poem in first-person past tense

  Intention: This means that the viewpoint is limited to the speaker's perspective and suggests that it is a recollection of a memory: the overall tone of the poem is one of profound sadness, with no hint of positivity

  
  

  Evidence: Hardy uses imagery to create a bleak atmosphere

  Intention: The opening lines of the poem creates an intense image of cold and desolate surroundings
• Neutral tone- language:

  Evidence: Hardy employs pathetic fallacy by describing "winter" to evoke feelings of sadness and coldness right from the beginning

  Intention: Pathetic fallacy is used to depict the speaker's desperation and the first descriptions of the winter day indicate a dull and colourless environment, which signifies a lack of warmth or connection between the coupleThe phrase "starving sod" is used as a metaphor to describe the soil while personifying it as miserable, emphasised further through the use of sibilance which is used to create a sense of despair
• Neutral tones in the language of the poem suggest a lack of passion or intensity.
• Hardy's choice of words such as "gray", "white", and "ash" further reinforces this sense of lifelessness and emotional emptiness.
• The language of colour used throughout the poem reflects the faded and colourless nature of the relationship, as well as the speaker’s state of mind and conveys a sense of melancholy and resignation.
• The emotion of bitterness is personified, which suggests that nature is intentionally positioned against the couple’s relationship.
• The poem is characterized by the absence of colour, which is symbolic of the pain and loss experienced by the couple.
• The use of the word "neutral" in the title suggests a lack of passion or intensity.
• Hardy's choice of words such as "gray", "white", and "ash" further reinforces this sense of lifelessness and emotional emptiness.
• The language of colour used throughout the poem reflects the faded and colourless nature of the relationship, as well as the speaker’s state of mind and conveys a sense of melancholy and resignation.
• The emotion of bitterness is personified, which suggests that nature is intentionally positioned against the couple’s relationship.