Robert Graves: Sick Love

O Love, be fed with apples while you may,

And feel the sun and go in royal array,
A smiling innocent on the heavenly causeway,

Though in what listening horror for the cry

That soars in outer blackness dismally,
The dumb blind beast, the paranoiac fury:

Be warm, enjoy the season, lift your head.

Exquisite in the pulse of tainted blood,
That shivering glory not to be despised.

Take your delight in momentariness,

Walk between dark and dark a shining space
With the graves narrowness, though not its peace.

The Graves-Riding partnership was a curious one, to say the least. Judging from Martin
Seymour-Smiths 1982 biography of Graves,[1] it could easily be characterized by the title of
one of Gravess poems: Sick Love. For Graves, Riding was, variously, the incarnation of an
ancient Mediterranean moon goddess, the embodiment of the perfection of poetry itself, and a
feminist advocating the overthrow of male-dominated society. Whatever role she played, she
demanded, and received, total fealty from her subject. The Graves-Riding bond involved far
more than Gravess relinquishing the household to her, or submitting his poems to her for
approval, or accepting a subordinate role in their joint literary endeavorsall of which he
did. The fact is, she treated him, as Tom Matthews, an American writer who stayed with the
couple in 19 3 2, observed, like a dog. There was no prettier way to put it. Matthews, whose
testimony is recorded in Seymour-Smiths book, wrote that Graves
seemed in a constant swivet of anxiety to please her, to forestall her every wish, like a small
boy dancing attendance on a rich aunt of uncertain temper .... Since I admired him and looked
up to him as a dedicated poet and a professional writer, his subservience to her and her
contemptuous bearings towards him troubled and embarrassed me . . . she was not so much
his mistress as his master .
So enthralled was Graves with Riding that he even emulated her in a (pre-Majorca) 1929
suicide attempt, undertaken because she loved a third party (one Geoffrey Phibbs) and Phibbs
loved Nancy Nicholson. Graves leapt from a third-story window after Riding had jumped
from the floor above. (This had been preceded by Ridings drinking Lysol, to no effect.)
Graves escaped unscathed; Riding suffered a compound fracture of the spine. According to

Seymour-Smith, the polices grilling of Graves after this incident was one of the experiences
that made him want to leave England.
The sources of Gravess idealization of and submission to Laura Riding are well documented
in the recently published Robert Graves: The Assault Heroic, 1895-1926 by Richard Perceval
Graves, the first installment of a proposed three-volume biography of Graves by his nephew.
[2]
IDEAS:
Carpe diem, enjoy love while you can, irony, love is threatened and tainted from the start
implied reference to Eves temptation and the Fall, it is of lust, but death remains a glory
ambivalent in message
The poem can be thought of as a variation on the old
theme of "Carpe diem" Love is fleeting; grasp it while
you can. Yet although the poet unhesitatingly advocates
the enjoyment of love while it lasts, he does not consider
this enjoyment an unqualified boon. Already in the third
line irony has crept in. Love is threatened and tainted
from the start ; even when self-confidently fed with apples
and here there may be an implied reference to Eve's
temptation and the Fall Love is but "a smiling innocent," forever listening for a cry out of the darkness, or
for death in the form of dumb beast or fury. As to the
nature of the taint from which love suffers, it would seem,
by reference to other poems written in the same period
("The Succubus," "Ulysses,"" Down Wanton, Down"),
that it is that of lust. There was also, Mr Graves states, a
taint of madness in the loved woman's heredity. Yet love
remains a "glory." The epithet "shivering" suggests its
hectic nature, and the contradiction in it between heat
and cold.
The poem is ambivalent in its message. Its divided
viewpoint is expressed by the contradictions between the
terzets, and often within the lines also, whereby comfort alternates with
despair, tranquillity with violence. A parallel effect is attained by its
broken rhyme pattern, inexact
vowel rhymes in the first half being succeeded by equally
imperfect consonantal rhymes in the second. But the
poem's standpoint is on balance optimistic; love must be
accepted although it is from the beginning diseased.
In Poems ig26-igjo the poem "Sick Love," quoted
in the first chapter of this book, pleads for the acceptance
of love even though it can only be short-lived :

1. The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock

Sio credesse che mia risposta fosse

A persona che mai tornasse al mondo,
Questa fiamma staria senza piu scosse.
Ma perciocche giammai di questo fondo
Non torno vivo alcun, siodo il vero,
Senza tema dinfamia ti rispondo.

LET us go then, you and I,

When the evening is spread out against the sky
Like a patient etherized upon a table;
Let us go, through certain half-deserted streets,
The muttering retreats

Of restless nights in one-night cheap hotels

And sawdust restaurants with oyster-shells:
Streets that follow like a tedious argument
Of insidious intent
To lead you to an overwhelming question.

10

Oh, do not ask, What is it?

Let us go and make our visit.

In the room the women come and go

Talking of Michelangelo.

The yellow fog that rubs its back upon the window-panes,
The yellow smoke that rubs its muzzle on the window-panes
Licked its tongue into the corners of the evening,
Lingered upon the pools that stand in drains,
Let fall upon its back the soot that falls from chimneys,
Slipped by the terrace, made a sudden leap,

20

15

And seeing that it was a soft October night,

Curled once about the house, and fell asleep.

And indeed there will be time

For the yellow smoke that slides along the street,
Rubbing its back upon the window panes;

25

There will be time, there will be time

To prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet;
There will be time to murder and create,
And time for all the works and days of hands
That lift and drop a question on your plate;

30

Time for you and time for me,

And time yet for a hundred indecisions,
And for a hundred visions and revisions,
Before the taking of a toast and tea.

In the room the women come and go

35

Talking of Michelangelo.

And indeed there will be time

To wonder, Do I dare? and, Do I dare?
Time to turn back and descend the stair,
With a bald spot in the middle of my hair

40

(They will say: How his hair is growing thin!)

My morning coat, my collar mounting firmly to the chin,
My necktie rich and modest, but asserted by a simple pin
(They will say: But how his arms and legs are thin!)
Do I dare

45

Disturb the universe?

In a minute there is time
For decisions and revisions which a minute will reverse.

For I have known them all already, known them all:

Have known the evenings, mornings, afternoons,

50

I have measured out my life with coffee spoons;

I know the voices dying with a dying fall
Beneath the music from a farther room.
So how should I presume?

And I have known the eyes already, known them all

55

The eyes that fix you in a formulated phrase,

And when I am formulated, sprawling on a pin,
When I am pinned and wriggling on the wall,
Then how should I begin
To spit out all the butt-ends of my days and ways?

60

And how should I presume?

And I have known the arms already, known them all

Arms that are braceleted and white and bare
(But in the lamplight, downed with light brown hair!)
Is it perfume from a dress

65

That makes me so digress?

Arms that lie along a table, or wrap about a shawl.
And should I then presume?
And how should I begin?
.

Shall I say, I have gone at dusk through narrow streets

And watched the smoke that rises from the pipes
Of lonely men in shirt-sleeves, leaning out of windows?

I should have been a pair of ragged claws

Scuttling across the floors of silent seas.
.

70

And the afternoon, the evening, sleeps so peacefully!

75

Smoothed by long fingers,

Asleep tired or it malingers,
Stretched on the floor, here beside you and me.
Should I, after tea and cakes and ices,
Have the strength to force the moment to its crisis?

80

But though I have wept and fasted, wept and prayed,

Though I have seen my head (grown slightly bald) brought in upon a platter,
I am no prophetand heres no great matter;
I have seen the moment of my greatness flicker,
And I have seen the eternal Footman hold my coat, and snicker,

85

And in short, I was afraid.

And would it have been worth it, after all,

After the cups, the marmalade, the tea,
Among the porcelain, among some talk of you and me,
Would it have been worth while,

90

To have bitten off the matter with a smile,

To have squeezed the universe into a ball
To roll it toward some overwhelming question,
To say: I am Lazarus, come from the dead,
Come back to tell you all, I shall tell you all

95

If one, settling a pillow by her head,

Should say: That is not what I meant at all;
That is not it, at all.

And would it have been worth it, after all,

Would it have been worth while,

100

After the sunsets and the dooryards and the sprinkled streets,
After the novels, after the teacups, after the skirts that trail along the floor
And this, and so much more?

It is impossible to say just what I mean!

But as if a magic lantern threw the nerves in patterns on a screen:
Would it have been worth while
If one, settling a pillow or throwing off a shawl,
And turning toward the window, should say:
That is not it at all,
That is not what I meant, at all.
.

110
No! I am not Prince Hamlet, nor was meant to be;
Am an attendant lord, one that will do
To swell a progress, start a scene or two,
Advise the prince; no doubt, an easy tool,
Deferential, glad to be of use,

115

Politic, cautious, and meticulous;

Full of high sentence, but a bit obtuse;
At times, indeed, almost ridiculous
Almost, at times, the Fool.

I grow old I grow old

120

I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled.

Shall I part my hair behind? Do I dare to eat a peach?

I shall wear white flannel trousers, and walk upon the beach.
I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each.

I do not think that they will sing to me.

I have seen them riding seaward on the waves

Combing the white hair of the waves blown back
When the wind blows the water white and black.

125

105

We have lingered in the chambers of the sea

By sea-girls wreathed with seaweed red and brown

130

Till human voices wake us, and we drown.

On "The Love Song of J.

Alfred Prufrock"
J. Hillis Miller
Prufrock's paralysis follows naturally from this subjectivizing of everything. If each
consciousness is an opaque sphere, then Prufrock has no hope of being understood by others.
"No experience," says Bradley in a phrase Eliot quotes, "can lie open to inspection from
outside" (KE, 203). Prufrock's vision is incommunicable, and whatever he says to the lady
will be answered by, "That is not what I meant at all./That is not it, at all" (CP, 6). The lady is
also imprisoned in her own sphere, and the two spheres can never, like soap bubbles, become
one. Each is impenetrable to the other.
If other consciousnesses exist only as opaque objects for Prufrock, he has an equally unhappy
relation to time and space. One of the puzzles of the poem is the question as to whether
Prufrock ever leaves his room. It appears that he does not, so infirm is his will, so ready "for a
hundred indecisions,/And for a hundred visions and revisions,/Before the taking of a toast and
tea" (CP, 4). In another sense Prufrock would be unable to go anywhere, however hard he
tried. If all space has been assimilated into his mind, then spatial movement would really be
movement in the same place, like a man running in a dream. There is no way to distinguish
between actual movement and imaginary movement. However far Prufrock goes, he remains
imprisoned in his own subjective space, and all his experience is imaginary. It seems to be
some perception of this which keeps him in his room, content to imagine himself going
through the streets, ascending the lady's stair, and telling her "all," like Lazarus back from the
dead. There is no resurrection from the death which has undone him, and this is one meaning
of the epigraph from Dante.
Time disappears in the same way. Space must be exterior to the self if movement through it is
to be more than the following of a tedious argument in the mind. In the same way only an
objective time can be other than the self, so that the flow of time can mean change for that
self. But time, like space, has only a subjective existence for Prufrock. As a result, past,
present, and future are equally immediate, and Prufrock is paralyzed. Like one of Bradley's
finite centers, he "is not in time," and "contains [his] own past and future" (KE, 205).
Memories, ironic echoes of earlier poetry, present sensations, anticipations of what he might
do in the future ("I grow old . . . I grow old . . . / I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers
rolled" [CP, 71)--these are equally present. There is a systematic confusion of tenses and times
in the poem, so that it is difficult to tell if certain images exist in past, present, future.
Prufrock begins by talking of his visit to the lady as something yet to be done, and later talks

of his failure to make the visit as something long past ("And would it have been worth it, after
all,/Would it have been worth while" (CP, 61). Like the women talking of Michelangelo, he
exists in an eternal present, a frozen time in which everything that might possibly happen to
him is as if it had already happened: "For I have known them all already, known them all"
(CP, 4). In this time of endless repetition Prufrock cannot disturb the universe even if he
should presume to try to do so. Everything that might happen is foreknown, and in a world
where only one mind exists the foreknown has in effect already happened and no action is
possible. Prufrock's infirmity of will is not so much a moral deficiency as a consequence of
his subjectivism.
From Poets of Reality: Six Twentieth-Century Writers. Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of
Harvard UP, 1965.

David Spurr
This five-line interlude ending on "the floors of silent seas" forms an encapsulated version of
the remainder of the poem, in which the frustrated effort to establish purposive discourse
leads once again to withdrawal downward and inward to a silent world of instinctual being. A
return to images of distension and distracting sensuality provokes a final impulse toward
violent imposition of the will--"to force the moment to its crisis"--which ends, like previous
thoughts of disturbing the universe, in ruthless self-mockery. The image of decapitation
parodies the theme of disconnected being and provides for at least a negative definition of the
self: "I am no prophet."
By this point the tense has quietly shifted from present to past, and the speaker offers a series
of prolonged interrogatives on the consequences of action not taken. While its grammatical
context ("And would it have been worth it") reduces it to the contemplation of "what might
have been"; the language and imagery of this passage enact with renewed intensity the
recurring drama of mental conflict:
Would it have been worth while,
To have bitten off the matter with a smile,
To have squeezed the universe into a ball
To roll it towards some overwhelming question,
To say: "I am Lazarus, come from the dead,
Come back to tell you all, I shall tell you all."
The infinitives in this passage--to have bitten, to have squeezed, to roll--conform to the
poem's widespread use of transitive verbs of direct action in expressing the speaker's violent
impulse to combat the forces of disorder: to murder and create, to disturb the universe, to spit
The speaker's failure to master language--"It is impossible to say just what I mean!"--leads in
this case not to a statement on the inadequacy of words themselves, but rather reflects upon
the speaker's own impotence. In a poem so obsessed with problems of speech and definition,
to have failed with words is to have lost the war on the inarticulate: the speaker as heroic
Lazarus or Prince Hamlet is suddenly reduced to the stature of an attendant lord, "Full of high
sentence, but a bit obtuse." The old man with rolled-up trouser bottoms has shrunk from his

former size. Paradoxically, this diminution of the outer self--the part of the mind concerned
with imposing order on experience--brings about a corresponding expansion of the inner self.
The speaker is a failed poet in terms of his inability to "murder" existing structures in order to
"create" anew; be finds it impossible to say what be wants to say.
From Conflicts in Consciousness: T.S. Eliots Poetry and Criticism. Urbana: University of
Illinois Press, 1984.

Carol Christ
For Eliot, poetic representation of a powerful female presence created difficulty in embodying
the male. In order to do so, Eliot avoids envisioning the female, indeed, avoids attaching
gender to bodies.
We can see this process clearly in "The Love Song of J. Prufrock." The poem circles around
not only an unarticulated question, as all readers agree, but also an unenvisioned center, the
"one" whom Prufrock addresses. The poem never visualizes the woman with whom Prufrock
imagines an encounter except in fragments and in plurals -- eyes, arms, skirts - synecdoches
we might well imagine as fetishistic replacements. But even these synecdochic replacements
are not clearly engendered. The braceleted arms and the skirts are specifically feminine, but
the faces, the hands, the voices, the eyes are not. As if to displace the central human object it
does not visualize, the poem projects images of the body onto the landscape (the sky, the
streets, the fog), but these images, for all their marked intimation of sexuality, also avoid the
designation of gender (the muttering retreats of restless nights, the fog that rubs, licks, and
lingers). The most visually precise images in the poem are those of Prufrock himself, a
Prufrock carefully composed "My morning coat, my collar mounting firmly to the chin, /
My necktie rich and modest, but asserted by a simple pin" -- only to be decomposed by the
watching eyes of another into thin arms and legs, a balding head brought in upon a platter.
Moreover, the images associated with Prufrock are themselves, as Pinkney observes,
terrifyingly unstable, attributes constituting the identity of the subject at one moment only to
be wielded by the objective the next, like the pin that centers his necktie and then pinions him
to the wall or the arms that metamorphose into Prufrock's claws. The poem, in these various
ways, decomposes the body, making ambiguous its sexual identification. These scattered body
parts at once imply and evade a central encounter the speaker cannot bring himself to
confront, but in the pattern of their scattering they constitute the voice that Prufrock feels
cannot exist in the gaze of the other.
From "Gender, Voice, and Figuration in Eliots Early Poetry." In Ronald Bush (Ed. ) T.S.
Eliot: The Modernist in History. Cambridge University Press.

Mutlu Konuk Blasing

Prufrock's problem is in fact the problem the expressive medium introduces, and this
identification of the formal and rhetorical dimensions of the medium with the emotion or

psychic burden of the speaker makes for the airless closure of the poem. As in Poe's "Raven,"
the speaker's relationship to the form within which his adventure transpires constitutes the
nature of his adventure: his form determines the content of his story.
And if Prufrock's problem coincides with the dynamics of Eliot's particular medium of
dramatic monologue, Eliot's problem coincides with the dynamics of the poetic medium itself;
just as Prufrock is paralyzed by his consciousness of the other, his author is paralyzed by his
consciousness of the tradition. In the line "It is impossible to say just what I mean!" the
dramatic character and his author meet, "uttering the words in unison, though perhaps with
somewhat different meaning," and displaying the rhetorical advantage a dramatic poet holds.
Eliot's ironic use of rhyme and meter in "Prufrock" acknowledges the complicity of the poet's
conventions with his persona's "de-meaning" language. On the one hand, the "comic" meter of
lines like "In the room the women come and go / Talking of Michelangelo" equates poetic
forms that channel force and the social forms of keeping conversation light. On the other
hand, dreams of escape from the pre-formulating formulae are them- selves recounted in
formulaic lines, for the solution to Prufrock's problem would be a "solution" for Eliot as wellforgetting the present and the separate self, surrendering to the oblivion of an unconscious
nature and the "natural" meter of English poetry:
The poem's epigraph at once opens and closes this discourse of a poet-hero generically old
before his time.
Prufrock's acute consciousness of his age is thus the classic symptom of Eliot's philosophical
and literary problem. And attempts to free the individual voice by breaking out of forms
register, as in "Prufrock," only as impulses to dismemberment and suicide.
from American Poetry: The Rhetoric of Its Forms. New Haven: Yale UP, 1987. Copyright
1987.

Michael North
Everything in "Prufrock" trickles away into parts related to one another only by contiguity.
Spatial progress in the poem is diffident or deferred, a "scuttling" accomplished by a pair of
claws disembodied so violently they remain "ragged." In the famous opening, "the evening is
spread out against the sky / Like a patient etherised upon a table," and the simile makes an
equation between being spread out and being etherised that continues elsewhere in the poem
when the evening, now a bad patient, "malingers, / Stretched on the floor, here beside you and
me." There it "sleeps so peacefully! / Smoothed by long fingers . . . ." This suspension is a
rhetorical as well as a spatial and emotional condition.
In certain lines, metaphor dissolves into metonymy before the reader's eyes. "The yellow fog
that rubs its back upon the window-panes" appears clearly to every reader as a cat, but the
itself is absent, represented explicitly only in parts -- back, muzzle, tongue -- and by its
actions -- licking, slipping, leaping, curling. The metaphor has in a sense been hollowed out to
be replaced by a series of metonyms, and thus it stands as a rhetorical introduction to what
follows. The people in the poem also appear as disembodied parts or ghostly actions. They are
"the faces that you meet," the "hands / That lift and drop a question on your plate," the "Arms
that are braceleted and white and bare," the "eyes that fix you in a formulated phrase."
Prufrock himself fears such a reduction, to use Kenneth Burke's term for the effect of
metonymy.
cat

In this poem the horror of sex seems to come in part from its power to metonymize. Like
Augustine, Eliot sees sex as the tyranny of one part of the body over the whole. Though
Eliot is far too circumspect to name this part, he figures its power in his poetry by the
rebelliousness of mere members: hands, arms, eyes. Sexual desire pulls the body apart,
so that to give in to it is to suffer permanent dismemberment. This may account for the
odd combination in Eliot's work of sexual ennui and libidinous violence. The tyranny of
one part scatters all the others, reducing the whole to impotence. In this way, the
violence of sex robs the individual of the integrity necessary to action.
To know "all" already is to be paralyzed, disabled, because "all" is not full of possibility but
paradoxically empty, constituted as it is by pure repetition, part on part on part. In a figure that
exactly parallels the bodily metonymies, time becomes a collection of individual parts, just as
the poem's human denizens had been little more than parts: "And I have known the eyes
already, known them all"; ".
from Michael North, The Political Aesthetic of Yeats, Eliot, and Pound. Cambridge:
Cambridge UP, 1991. Reprinted with permission of the author.

Roger Mitchell
J. Alfred Prufrock is not just the speaker of one of Eliot's poems. He is the Representative
Man of early Modernism. Shy, cultivated, oversensitive, sexually retarded (many have said
impotent), ruminative, isolated, self-aware to the point of solipsism, as he says, "Am an
attendant lord, one that will do / To swell a progress, start a scene or two." Nothing revealed

the Victorian upper classes in Western society more accurately, unless it was a novel by Henry
James, and nothing better exposed the dreamy, insubstantial center of that consciousness than
a half-dozen poems in Eliot's first book. The speakers of all these early poems are trapped
inside their own excessive alertness. They look out on the world from deep inside some
private cave of feeling, and though they see the world and themselves with unflattering
exactness, they cannot or will not do anything about their dilemma and finally fall back on
self-serving explanation.
from A Profile of Twentieth-Century American Poetry. Ed. Jack Myers and David Wojahan.
Copyright 1991 by Southern Illinois UP.

Neutral Tones

Related Poem Content Details

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By Thomas Hardy
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.
Your eyes on me were as eyes that rove
Over tedious riddles of years ago;
And some words played between us to and fro
On which lost the more by our love.
The smile on your mouth was the deadest thing
Alive enough to have strength to die;
And a grin of bitterness swept thereby
Like an ominous bird a-wing.
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.
Thomas Hardy: Neutral Tones Paper
Thomas Hardys Neutral Tones examines a relationship that has lost its passion and fallen
into a state of near-death. In the poem, Hardy uses the environment as an objective correlative
to invoke a state of melancholia in the reader, which is the same feeling the speaker had about
the relationship in the poem. Essentially, Hardy creates a dying environment to symbolize a
perishing relationship. In addition to serving as an objective correlative, the bleak world
Hardy describes inNeutral Tones also symbolizes the speakers dead relationship. Through his
use of imagery, construction of the poem, and paradoxes, Hardy creates a bleak world of
once-beautiful things lying in despair which invokes a sense of hopelessness and melancholia
in the reader.
Hardy utilizes visual imagery to invoke a feeling of emptiness which parallels the neutrality
of the speakers relationship. Hardy immediately calls attention to the winter day, quickly
conjuring feelings in the reader of a coldness, a chilly stoicism, and images of a blank world.
In addition to the feelings invoked, images of white and gray appear. The use of color,
specifically white and gray, is a primary method Hardy employs to create a sense of
melancholia in the reader. White and gray are both colors that are repeated as Hardy continues
to weave the poems setting. He creates a white sun, which creates feelings of frigidity. This is
in direct contrast to a typical sun; in general, the sun is a shining yellow globe representative
of happiness but Hardy rejects that image. Instead, he uses his white sun to symbolize the
coldness of the relationship within the poem. In fact, that God-curst sun is the only thing
that could provide relief from the blank gray and white world Hardy conjures but that one

possible ray of hope is cursed and chidden of God. Not even a normally uplifting symbol
has hope in Neutral Tones.
Like white, the use of gray, which occurs several times in describing the world of the poem,
invokes in the reader a feeling of blankness. Gray itself is a strange pigmentation; it is neither
the absence of color nor the abundance of it. It inherently conjures images of a blank slate and
feelings of uncertainty and depression. By creating a pond edged with grayish leaves, Hardy
uses the color to illustrate the feelings of the characters within the poem and causes the reader
to feel their blankness. The leaves are not even fully gray, they are grayish, which further
exemplifies the despondence of the relationship. Gray, which is an odd middle ground of a
color, is eerie and indecisive. There is a faint tinge of white but it is muted by darkness: a hint
of hope faded by depression. Hardy uses the color to explore the immobility of the speaker; it
is hard for him to decide if the relationship is truly dead or if there may, perhaps, be some
small ray of hope in a smile [that is] the deadest thing alive.
Hardys use of imagery speaks of the actual physical location of the speaker but it is clear
that it is more meaningful than just a simple exploration of the setting. Instead of being
merely descriptive, the pond that winter day turns into a symbol for the faded romance
between the couple. The last two lines of Neutral Tones shed intense light on how Hardy
parallels the environment with the relationship. In those last two lines, Hardy groups three
bleak, blank, destitute pieces of the setting with the face of the woman in the poem. By doing
so, Hardy implies that the womans face is also bleak, blank, and destitute; there is no
expression left and not only is the setting blank, so is her face.
There is nothing left for the couple to explore and though it is clear that there once was love,
that love has dissipated. It was most likely a passionate relationship that has simply faded
away with time. In the beginning of a romantic relationship there are constant questions but as
the two people grow together, it becomes more apparent that the tedious riddles [were]
solved years ago. Without the possibility of the unknown, love grows stale. Thus, after the
riddles were solved, the duo have little else and grow apart. This sentiment is mirrored in
Hardys description of the destitute environment; without the warmth of spring, which brings
with it a newness, life is destined to wither away. Likewise, without the promise of adventure
in a relationship, passion is destined to fade.
The construction of Neutral Tones also illuminates the loveless relationship of the speaker and
his companion. Hardy uses alliteration several times in the poem in order to call attention to
important points. For example, by using alliteration in reference to the starving sod around
the pond, Hardy communicates to the reader that the starving sod is actually more than
simply dying earth. Instead, it is clear that Hardy is referencing the dying relationship. Much
as the relationship has starved itself by not having any possibility of adventure or newness,
the sod is starving as winter keeps the world in its grasp.
Hardy uses alliteration again to emphasize the decayed relationships destruction of love.
The speaker states that, after the day in question, he learned that love deceives and wrings
with wrong. Since that day at the pond, the speaker has lost sight of love. Instead, love and
passion have been replaced with bleak nothingness. It is the use of alliteration in this line that
communicates that the speaker has learned that love is a tortuous emotion.
Also compositionally significant is the absence of dialogue. The man and woman stand next
to each other, completely immobile, even look at one and other, yet say nothing worth

explicitly writing out in the poem. Hardy does ambiguously mention some words played
between them but he does not write what was actually said. Instead, he glosses over the
conversation and that omission is indicative of the unimportance of the characters discussion.
The relationship is so empty, not even words spoken are worth retelling.
Once again drawing attention to the fact that the couple is trapped in one wrenching
moment of time, Hardy uses a simple rhyme scheme. In fact, throughout the entire poem, it
never changes from the ABBA formation. Hardy does this purposefully to show the static
nature of the poems content. Keeping the rhyme scheme from varying at all through the
course of the poem highlights the couples loss of passion and their lack of change. Nothing
in the poem moves, not the characters interaction nor the construction, in order to
demonstrate that nothing is moving within the relationship.
Hardy uses paradoxes to further illustrate the characters stalemated position. The third
stanza, which deals most heavily with the actual relationship and less with the setting, is the
one most riddled with said paradoxes. It is when the speaker is specifically addressing the
partner in the poem that Hardy uses paradoxes, which lends credence to the idea that the
paradoxes are directly related to a sense of immobility. It is a smile on the womans mouth
that is the deadest thing alive enough to have strength to die. This ambiguity is
representative of the speakers motionless, or neutral, state.
Hardy is once again paradoxical while describing the partner in the poem, citing her grin of
bitterness. Typically, grins are not bitter; here, Hardy draws attention to the ending of a once
passionate relationship. In both paradoxical references, the speaker is mentioning the
womans smile. A smile is generally not dead or bitter but when Hardy juxtaposes the image
of a smile with these harsher words, the state of the speaker is all the more apparent; he is
trapped and the reader feels trapped as well, hopelessly locked in Hardys circular paradoxes.
The speaker is in a dead relationship and the paradoxes serve to exemplify his immobility.
Neither the man nor the woman is in love with the other in Hardys Neutral Tones. Both
parties are resigned to the fact that their relationship has stalemated and neither party can
rectify the problem.Simply put, neither partner loves the other; the passion has died out of an
old relationship. In order to emphasize the melancholy tone of the poem, Hardy creates a
withering environment as the setting then, using that setting as objective correlative, he
utilizes rich imagery to invoke a sense of melancholia in the reader. Hardy also uses the
composition of his poem in order to explore the death of the relationship; by keeping
everything extremely simple and static, he communicates the speakers immobility. Finally,
Hardy uses paradoxes to cement the feeling of melancholy and the notion of a passionless
relationship. These literary tactics serve to illuminate the point that what passion there once
was is there no longer.
By Alice Rackham.
- See more at: http://alicerackham.tumblr.com/post/77697915526/thomas-hardy-neutral-tonespaper#sthash.Y7dBQ0AF.dpuf