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Brittney Shoup
Burks
English 110
May 13, 2013
The denotation and the connotation of a poem can have a significant impact on the
overall meaning. “Neutral Tones” is a poem which uses both the connotative and denotative
meanings of words to get Thomas Hardy’s theme of the pain and regret resulting from lost love
across.
The words used in the first stanza, “winter,” “white,” “ash,” and “gray,” all provide for a
very gloomy, yet pure and neutral setting. The poem begins beside a pond on a winter’s day.
Winters denotative meaning suggests a cold day whereas the connotation meaning may mean the
last period of life, both meanings are vital to the poems overall subject-love being lost. When
thinking of winter, one may also think of the color white which is often times seen as snow, or
they may think of the pond, normally the color blue or green, becoming glossed over with ice
which ahs causes it to become more of a dull neutral color. The leaves that had fallen off the
trees (now ash) have turned gray. Gray’s connotative meaning is dark, and gloomy. This reflects
the title because in all the other season the colors are bright and vibrant, yet winter has calm
neutral colors; for example, white and gray.
In the third stanza it states “the smile on … [her] mouth was deadest thing” (Hardy 9), its
denotatively means not alive and connotatively means dull or boring. The lover smiled but that
too was dull and bitter. These demonstrate why the title is called “Neutral Tones” because the
actions are kept neutral by adding a balancing contradiction to it.
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The second stanza relates to the situation in which the speaker finds himself. In lines 5-6,
“Your eyes on me were as eyes that rove/over tedious riddles of year ago…” reveal that the
speaker and his lover have been together so long that the routine may have been tedious, tiring,
or wearisome. It suggests that perhaps their love is becoming boring and repetitious. The word
“played” suggests a game. The words played between the two lovers were almost like a game on
which each word began to lose its meaning. The relationship between the lovers suggests that
they are slowly losing their love and they are grinning and baring the loss.
The concluding stanza has the speaker come to a revelation using this experience as a
lesson rather than a wrong. This is the major point in which the poem’s title comes into play. It
denotes a feeling of something that is neither right nor wrong, but a neutral ground. The
experience of lost love shapes the speaker rather than bringing him down. Therefore, whenever
he thinks of the deception of love and the lessons he learns from it, he thinks of that gray, dull
winter’s day.