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. (Nutral Tones, By Thomas Hardy)
Do you remember our wedding day, when I looked into your eyes and I understood everything? You did not even need to say it because I already knew it. I could read it in your eyes, I could feel it; you loved me. Our spirits were flying, wondering around the globe, feeling the most beautiful moments of our lives. Our souls were full of life, of love, of happiness, every body could tell what feelings we were going through. One look at our smiles and laughs could tell how much alive we were. Nature was celebrating our love, the birds were singing, the trees were dressed up with their beautiful green dresses, and even the sun was bursting with warmth and cheerfulness. Oh, I was dancing, flying, running through the flowery fields. I wished everyone could feel our happiness. What happened? After all these years, look to the nature that celebrated our love. The trees are losing their leaves and even what is left gray, oh, its cold today, yes, of course it’s a winter day. Look at the sun; it lost its shiny warm color. Every thing seems dead. Your eyes are full of lifelessness, and even your smile that gave me life before is dead now, just like our love. Where is our love? Did you love me all these years, or was it just a dream? How could you do that? You deceived me. Just like the beauty of nature, it faded a way.
As we explain every aspect of nature and people’s faces or attitude to match our feelings and dreams, Thomas Hardy in his poem “Neutral Tones,” is dramatizing the conflict between reality and self- deceit, particularly as this conflict unfolded to show the speaker his real feelings after the death of love between him and his wife.
From the middle of nature’s beauty, the speaker starts to describe the place where he met his wife on that particular day. His words seem to be a cover for deeper meanings that he is trying to avoid. By using specific words like “a pond,” which gives the feeling of stagnation, instead of river for example, that gives the meaning of life. In addition, he describes the situation in “winter day,” which gives the reader another feeling of coldness. Moreover, “starving sod” also give the meaning of lifelessness, and the gray leaves gives the feeling of death. All these descriptions in the first stanza give the reader a sense of the deep feeling of sadness that the speaker is trying to cloth with the nature’s beauty. The speaker is trying to deceive himself, by looking for aspects of happiness in the nature to describe. He is ignoring his sadness by covering it with the beauty of nature.
From lifeless nature descriptions, the speaker started to describe the moment when his wife was looking at him. Reading the first two lines of the second stanza, give a detailed explanation of his wife’s feelings, as he writes:
Your eyes on me were as eyes that rove
Over tedious riddles of years ago;
She is looking at him and her eyes are wondering, questioning in an extreme length about all the previous years that they lived together. It’s that kind of question that requires a thought before answering. She is questioning him about their love that died after all these years. Did this love actually die? Or, maybe it never was! This is obvious when the speaker explains the words that they exchanged, and how these words were lost as he lost her love. After the speaker read all these meanings in his wife’s eyes, as he was examining her face, he noticed her smile, as the first truth of the real feelings she has toward him. As he said “The smile on your mouth was the deadest thing,” he noticed how her smile that is suppose to be alive to express love seemed dead, it’s as dead as if it only can live to die. After noticing and understanding the real feelings that his wife has toward him, reality started to reveal itself, and he started to understand the deep secret of his sadness. As if it resembles a foretelling evil to him, as he said it was as “an ominous bird”, and he started to taste the real feeling of “bitterness.” Reality started to reveal itself over self-deceit, to give the speaker the ability to discover his real feelings that he tried to avoid.
Accordingly, in the last stanza, the speaker explains how this moment taught him a lesson that he should have known long ago. He discovered the fact that he deceived himself all these years with the wrong explanation of his love. After revealing this fact, he can see everything he tried to describe before clearly, and he understood the real meanings of looking on his wife’s face, the sun, the tree and the “pond edged with grayish leaves.” As he writes in the last two lines of the poem, “Your face, and the God-crust sun, and a tree, and a pond edged with grayish leaves.” In this way, the poet reinforces the conflict between reality that he can see clearly and the way he tried to deceive himself in the beginning of the poem.
