Hardy's Presentation of Grief in "Neutral Tones" and "I Look Into My Glass" Anonymous 11th Grade

The poems under study are Neutral Tones ("NT") and I Look Into My Glass ("Glass"). Both poems focus on loss of a different kind: "Glass" expresses the loss of Hardy's youth; "NT" focuses on the death of Hardy's estranged wife, it grieves the loss of their love. Although the losses are different, both poems use the vehicle of time to express Hardy's sadness, "Glass" through the passage of a day and "NT" through the passage of the seasons.

In "Glass", the verbs cleverly highlight the passage of time and the pain of the loss of Hardy's youth. In the first two lines, "look" and "view" are both in the present tense: Hardy is both literally looking into his mirror and figuratively looking at himself, being both retrospective and introspective. However, with the sight of his aging skin, the tense quickly changes to the conditional. Hardy wishes that his heart were as "thin" as his "wasting skin". He wishes his heart weren't so full of feeling and passion, that he had the moderate, dispassionate feelings of an old man; for then it would not hurt if someone did not reciprocate his feelings. In the final stanza, he reverts to the present tense, and the verbs he uses here highlight both his pain and his passivity. Time, personified, is...