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How can you account for the love you have for a favorite poem? One way is simply to say that it sparks personal associations for you. For me, that’s true in the case of “Neutral Tones,” as I suspect it is for the many who regard it as one their favorite Hardy poems. After all, it vividly recounts that moment in a relationship when lovers become aware that they’re only prolonging its inevitable end. Since such experiences are apt to occur in the formative period of late adolescence, they’re apt to stick with you.
Indeed, the poem has those memorably melancholic phrases that can so haunt a lovelorn freshman pacing a campus on an early winter’s day: “alive enough to have strength to die,” “chidden of God,” “God-curst sun.” Yet its rueful undertone also has great appeal for those further along in life. Four decades after I first read it, having outgrown my bittersweet associations, I find a basically unchanged but far richer poem.
Now, as then, it seems suffused with that grim atmosphere so instantly recognizable as Hardyesque – a quality so palpable in poem after poem that it seems to exist above and beyond the poems themselves. In his lyric poetry especially, it always seems to be a damp, gray day. Two ill-fated lovers are locked, or were locked, or will be locked (sometimes all three) in a death struggle with love. Time is passing them by. There is something in the nature of the situation that will not allow it to be otherwise. And so on.
For me, “Neutral Tones” is a perfect embodiment of that atmosphere. Yet many of his other poems occupy the same emotional territory much less successfully. The difference, I think, has a great deal to do with the poet’s ability to meld meter with emotion in more or less supple ways. In With the Grain, Donald Davie observes that in many of Hardy’s ungainly moments, one can sense the hand of an engineer laboring too hard on the machinery. The rhymes can be heavy-handed, the words forced to fit the prosody. Take, for instance, a