“….As though it was chidden of God”
He describes the sun in this way telling us the sun was white as though God had told it off. Somehow their break up that day was like their punishment just like Adam and Eve when they were thrown out of the garden of Eden they lost their paradise. From my point of view it seemed to be his punishment because the girl did not seem to be affected much by what was happening. It seemed like she wanted to get out of the relationship anyway.
“Your eyes on me were as eyes that rove
Over tedious riddles of years ago”
This makes things more clear to me about how it shows she wasn’t interested in the relationship any more. To her it was like getting over something childish. She didn’t even focus on him – (for example, something that you liked when you were 2 would now seem really ridiculous and you wouldn’t even think of doing it again). That’s how it feels like for him. Her eyes were not focused on him - she seemed to be looking through him or over or even by him but not looking at him. It was like she was bored of the game and there was no more fun for her - everything seems to be predictable. She doesn’t seem to understand him again but he doesn’t realise or see the things she’s seeing - he didn’t seem to think this was what was going to happen and this would probably be the last time he saw her. The thing that also gives me this idea that she was ready to break up was when he talks about her smile:
“The smile on your mouth was the deadest thing”
As well as all of these the most symbolic idea I think that occoured to me in this poem was the part were their love seemed to be related to things ending in a few ways. He describes it as being grey and ash and these words are related to a fire going out. He also tells us that on that day there were greyish leaves at the edge of the pond. His statements they’ve made me think of their relationship or any relationship is like the four seasons we have. First there is winter :the end of something and the beginning of something new, then spring which is the beginning of new life whilst summer is known to be peak of life and Autumn is the ending.
Its set in a winter day by a still pond this as we know is when something ends and something new starts and its also accompanied with the still pond symbolising that their relationship was going nowhere - it had got to its boundary.
When you compare these poem with “Absence” by Elizabeth Jennings, we see that Jennings’s poem gives a totally different feeling. Jennings in this poem seems to be talking about loss in a different way – we do no know if she’s actually down about a break-up or someone’s death. In her setting she does the total opposite to Hardy. She set her poem on a perfect normal day when you wouldn’t think anything would go wrong. The birds in this poem are singing - but to her it seems depressing
“Singing an ecstasy I could not share”
The birds are happy (ecstasy is a drug which people take to make them forget about their problems that make them seem happy and worries free) and they have no worries and she wants to join in but she can’t because she’s depressed. She’s in a place, which to her contains bad memories. It seems like this was the place were she and her partner had either shared times together or this might have been the last place they were together. In this park to her nothing has changed - it all seems the same, the way it was when she last saw it. Personally I would like to ask her why she had gone there in the first place if she knew it had bad memories, but when I thought about the possible reason there could be: she might have gone there to see if she had over grown the memories and tried to cheer herself up. Unlike Hardy she realised when it had ended but as said earlier its not quite clear if she’s mourning someone or hurting from heart break. Hardy to me doesn’t seem to be grieving- about the loos but more of him looking back at that moment and thinking of all the signs he missed and how he let this love of his go without realising it, he has more of a dull feeling than grief - Jennings seems to be at a different point of grief, some how at the beginning of it. I’m not quite sure if Jennings is grieving over someone from years ago or from something recent as Hardy gives us the feeling that his first love was when he was a teenager and we tend to think that’s when most “first love” relationship happens. Jennings doesn’t make it clear in her poem but I would have loved to think that she was grieving over something recent because she talks about it like it was just few months ago.
“Nothing was changed, the gardens were well tended”
It seems like since she last went there with him nothing has changed: the place was clean and was still the same. It almost seemed like she was in the wrong scene or picture because trying to imagine a scene of a person grieving I’d want to think of the surrounding as empty almost picture the clouds grey and every where would seem still as if the place has been affected by the persons body language or emotional feelings. And Jennings poem has been presented to me as if she wasn’t meant to be there it almost seemed like the wrong place for her but yet she was there trying to see if maybe she’d got rid of the memory:
“Surely in this pleasure there could not be a pain to bear or any discord shake the level breeze”
Its like she meant she was at the middle of something that seemed alive like an ecstasy but she wasn’t joining in with the mood not even with the bird singing: she was still lost in her depression. It is as if she was disturbing the breeze from going the way it’s supposed to go she didn’t think anything could spoil the feeling around her but she was.
Everything seemed too much the same to her. She was in a place which in the beginning was complete and now that she’s back again to the same place there's now something missing and its him. It shook her that she was alone the idea of him not being there
“An earthquake tremor: fountain, birds and grass
Were shaken by my thinking of your name”
Its like when she thought of the name her insides were shaken - to her it seemed like there had been an earthquake and it looked as though the place also remembered the name because the birds started moving around from their trees and the grass shook. Unlike Hardys’ poem Jennings poem to me looks like she’s got harsh words its not clear why she makes it sound so harsh maybe was mad at him for leaving or mad at God for taking him or was just upset or even maybe mad at the park for still staying the same after those times both him and her spent there.
I prefer Thomas Hardy’s poem ‘Neutral Tones’ than Elizabeth Jenning’s. This is because to me Hardy has gone more into details about this feeling of his and made the readers in some way relate to him and see more into why he calls love torture. His poem also feels more truthful than ‘Absence’ because Absence seems to only describe the garden as a park not really going into details about her true feeling. In Hardy’s poem, as well as talking about the scene, he compacts his feelings as what he thought about the girl. He tells us about the expression on her face at that point in time:
Like an “Ominous bird in flight bird on-wing…”
which to meant anything such as when he saw the look on her face he knew something bad was or had happened almost like it was a sign of bad luck just like how people say that seeing a black cat passing your path is a sign of bad luck.
His poem is something I can easily relate to. It shows more into true feeling -something that a normal person would go through rather than Jennings which seems to be like something that would happen in a film. it also helps to relate to his poem more because its talking about teenage love mostly and how it seems foolish that he thought this ‘love’ of his was going to last forever but as we know it ends up burning out like fire.
The reason I would say I didn’t enjoy Elizabeth Jennings poem is because its dry and down. To me it is ironic because she talks about ecstasy, but when reading this poem it gets you to the opposite end of the stick. You get down and depressed almost making you share her depression, which would have been understandable, if she could go more into depth about what she was being depressed about. She doesn’t put the poem in words that will make a reader want to sit down and really think about - all she talks about is the absence of someone or something and we don’t know what it is. Her poem makes me think of a teenager who's just got their first love. Talking about how there are birds singing and how they might have felt with their first kiss and their break up almost like a mixed feeling. In a way, I want to try and understand her but the poem is too short, confusing and the feelings are not in such details.
In these two poems where everything symbolises something, I also noticed that even the rhyme and rhythm played a part as well. In Jennings poem you can feel the rhyme, which was irregular, it was sprung rhythm with 3 or 4 strong stresses in each line. It was as though the rhythms pulled against each other – one regular and the other one irregular. However , even the rhythm are to an extent disturbed as she uses unsettling half rhymes. I think the reasons why she has done the last rhyme like that might be to make the words of the lost love echo the way its been disrupted. Hardy poem has more predictable rhymes which I find less confusing.
When I read this poem by Jennings, I was immediately confused but with Hardys’ the rhyme as shown and the rhythm helped my understanding better because to me it felt like I could sense each stage of his relationship with the girl then, the rhythm beats out steadily like it’s the end of their relationship. Almost to the end, I knew he meant the relationship had faded out. He did not state this in those exact words but it was put in a symbolic way.
I would have thought that Elizabeth Jennings poem would be much easier to understand knowing that she was a modern poet so she would be modern with her words but Hardy’s poem interests me more. It makes me want to pay more attention to the words because it seems more truthful - more close to reality. When I say Hardy’s seems to be more like real love or like a relationship I mean that sooner or later most or some of these lovers finds it boring and they are now interested in different things or different people and most people end up getting hurt. Although some of his words were old fashioned (for example words like chidden, keen, thereby and sod), they still made sense.
I think anybody or the majority of people who read these two poems would be more interested in Hardy’s because it matches true feelings, easier to understand and its something you can easily tune into.
