Neutral Tones

• Thomas Hardy was born in 1840 and died in 1928
• Thomas Hardy


  Novelist and poet
• Thomas Hardy's novels


  • Many have a pessimistic tone and focus on the theme of people being trapped by fate
• Thomas Hardy faced many disappointments in his personal relationships
• Literary context

  Hardy was inspired by the Romantic poets who often wrote about nature and used pathetic fallacy as a key technique
• Title 'neutral'


  Suggests something without warmth, cold and emotionless. The opposite of colourful.
• Melancholy tone


  The speaker's emotions are deadened and this is reflected in the pathetic fallacy
• Neutral

  Can also mean 'indifference' - not caring one way or another
• A more bitter and resentful tone surfaces and this is true of the attitude of his lover as well
• The combination of the pond, winter and white sun


  Creates a cold and bleak landscape, which reflects the coldness of his lover's attitude towards him and how the passion and joy in their relationship has completely gone
• The falling leaves, the 'starving sod' (personification) - natural elements, once fertile and alive, are struggling to survive - symbolic of the couple's relationship
• Chidden


  Harshly rebuked ('told off')
• The sun is white, which is an inversion (opposite) of the usual connotations of sunlight with happiness and growth
• In mythology barren or bare lands were seen as being 'cursed' soil and this links to the imagery of the sun as 'cursed'
• Juxtaposition of 'smile' as the 'deadest thing'


  Contradictory, as something cannot be the most dead
• Oxymoron 'Alive enough to have strength to die'


  Emphasises how dead their relationship is
• Simile 'like an ominous bird a-wing'


  Birds were often seen as bad omens in ancient Greece and Rome, suggesting he can see that she wants her freedom and he sees this as ominous, another sign that the relationship is doomed
• Alliteration 'wrings with wrongs'


  Emphasises his anguish. The verb 'wring' means to twist and squeeze something, conveying his sense of suffering
• The repetition of the sun which is now 'God-curst' and the memory of her face which he sees whenever another relationship ends painfully
• The poem has a cyclical structure, ending where it began, beside the pond, revealing Hardy's inability to move forward from this memory