Neutral Tones — Edexcel GCSE English Literature 1ET0
Edexcel GCSE English Literature · 1ET0
Neutral Tones
The poems
What you need to know
The speaker remembers standing with a lover by a pond on the winter day their love died, and how the bleak scene has stayed with him as a lesson that love deceives.
How Hardy's colourless language, the white sun, grey leaves and starving earth, and a smile described as the deadest thing make the landscape mirror a dying love.
How to use the lesson's key quotations in an essay, with a short worked paragraph.
Key quotations: 'We stood by a pond that winter day', 'And the sun was white, as though chidden of God', 'the starving sod', 'They had fallen from an ash, and were gray', 'Over tedious riddles of years ago', 'The smile on your mouth was the deadest thing', 'Like an ominous bird a-wing', 'keen lessons that love deceives', 'And wrings with wrong', 'And a pond edged with grayish leaves'.
Form: four quatrains rhyming ABBA, three stanzas of memory and a final stanza in the present, with the pond returning at the end to frame the poem.
Context: written in 1867, more than thirty years before it was published in Wessex Poems (1898), Hardy's first collection; and the pessimism and sense of fate found across his writing.
Compares well with: A Complaint (a relationship that has changed), La Belle Dame Sans Merci (bleak settings that mirror lost love), One Flesh (passion gone cold) and Valentine (the pain within love).
