in the poem neutral tones, like many others , love is presented ad uncontrollable and unexplainable, love is presented as a curse that follows you throughout your life reminding you of how much it hurts.love alwase fades away.
the poem is about a man who, as far as we know, was in one meaningful relationship. the pain he felt when they parted made him feel like love itself was not worth the hurt and pain he felt, throughout the poem he reminisces about how it was on the day that they broke up. towards the end of the poem he describes the same pond he did in the in the beginning only with less enthusiasm.
the first thing that gives us a clue of the bad things to come was the fact that we felt he was reminiscing about a time that was better than it now, we new this due the fact that he was writing is past tense. he said “we stood by a pond” the fact that they were standing not sitting makes you feel like there was a sort of stale air between them. they were at a pond which is a direct connotation to love and romance but this feeling doesn’t last as shortly after this is mentioned we are told that is a winter day, although now we think of winter as a positive time, it is the time where people starve and animals die.
in the first stanza hardy focused on the setting; that it was a “winter day”, “the sun was white ” that “leaves lay on the ground” and that there was “an ash”.
the mention of a winters day immediately drawers the readers attention away from the fact that a couple are at the pond together; it makes us think of the coldness, that the pond is most likely frozen over, the the light of the sun is white and cold, and that all of the natural beauty associated with the pond is dead. the pond could be directly linked to there relationship which seems to be growing cold and nearing a winter it wall never survive.
in this poem the main focus is the image you can tell this as in the second stanza he said that some words played between” them, he was vague about what the conversation or argument they had entailed only that words were shared between them, we can infer that the the argument had was not a positive one due to the gloomy setting presented at the start of the poem.
the “leaves lay on the starving sod” “”they had fallen from the ash and were grey” the ash represents the relationship between to people and there grey leaves represent the love with the relationship, which is apparently old and withering falling from a diying relationship. the “white” “sun” “chidden of God” religion in brought in to the relationship to make it even more clear how uncontrollable love is. this is one of the ways love is communicated to the reader as out control.
a synecdoche is used to compare the dead smile on the woman false smile to an “ominous bird a-wing…” this comparison suggests that the smile was quick, breif and out of place as said in theb poem when hardy sais that her smile “was the deadist thing alive” but stil had “alive enough to die”.
at tye end of the poem in the last stanza hardy describes the same pod he did in the start of the pom ony wjen he described ith the second time he did so with much less enthusiasm as to say all of hes remaining live was drained out of hin whils he reminised.he said that things have shaped him, he lists “the God curst sun, and a tree, And a pond edged with grayish leaves” a sort of demise towards the setting he remembers for them braking up.
to conclude in thye poem thomas hardy used many different language features in maney different place to put across to the reader that love is a curse thet forsakes a man teaches him lessons and follows him throughout he’s life like a dark cloud on a sunny day
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