. The poems are 'Neutral Tones' by Thomas Hardy and 'One Flesh' by Elizabeth Jennings.

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Jessica Bending 10SD

 

                                  Comparing two Love Poems

This essay is about two poems on the same theme, love but they both have been written in a different period of time, one poem is post twentieth century and the other one is pre twentieth century. The poems are ‘Neutral Tones’ by Thomas Hardy and  ‘One Flesh’ by Elizabeth Jennings.

The poet who wrote ‘Neutral Tones’ Thomas Hardy also has written many famous novels and as a poet chooses his words very carefully.

In this poem, ‘Neutral Tones’, Hardy talks about the theme of love in a bad negative way. This poem has four stanzas and of four lines each. As in all poems the title acts as a signpost into the poem, this title suggests that the theme of the poem, love has no colour, no meaning, dull, one sided, bland and wishy-washy. This poem shows us the down sides of love being heart broken and it also shows the fragility of love and that love doesn’t last forever.

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The first line of the first stanza is significant, ‘We stood by a pond that winter day’, the deliberate use of the word ‘winter’ sets the scene in the way it tells us the time in the year and the mood, cold, chilly, dead. This first stanza uses alliteration in the sibilant ‘s’, ‘starving sod’ which also are hard words.

The second stanza suggests that there were arguments in the relationship ‘your eyes on me were eyes that rove’ and ‘words played between us to and fro’. It also suggests that the relationship had lost its flair, ‘over ...

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