Neutral tones (Thomas Hardy)中性色调（托马斯哈代）.docVIP

Neutral tones (Thomas Hardy) Reading + vocabulary Stanza 1 This stanza is a discription of the scene. Look at the elements: winter, pale sun, starving sod, white, grey, leaves fallen from a three ↓ All nature seems dead Neutral colours (white, grey) → title! ↓ Which feeling does this scene evoque? → sense of desolation, no warmth Stanza 2 She doesn’t seem happy, she’s not concentrated on him, she’s worrying about other things. The few words they say to eachother diminisch their love even more. Stanza 3 The women tries to smile, but it only reflects her lack of joy, it’s not an honest smile, it’s a fake smile. The smile turns into a bitter grimas. This grimas is ominous, why? ↓ It signals that something bad is going te happen. Maybe they will seperate? Their love is already dying. We can derive that from the previous stanza’s: Winter: nature is dead Cold colours, neutral tones Her eyes The few words between them Her smile ↓ Maybe their love is dying, the fire of their love is dying, their relationship is cold. The two middle stanza’s express the distance between the lovers. Their love isn’t strong anymore. Bird a-wing: Sometimes Hardy first designed the metre, and then he wrote the poem in that metre. Bird a-wing is an invented word because it had to fit in the poem, it had to rhyme,... Stanza 4 Hardy repeats the images of the first stanza in the last two lines of the poem. What is special in these last lines? → In the last line, a stress is added. Hardy was very interested in rythm. He often experimented whit it. Sometimes Hardy changes the rythm by adding or substracting a stress in a line. Normally the number of stresses is constant but by changing that number, you can show that a certain verse is very important. This is what he did in the last line of our poem. (It has four stresses, the final lines of the other stanza’s only have tree) He added a stress in the last line because this is a very important line. It’s the objective correlative : a set of objects