Key Quotes & Comparisons
English Lit: AQA GCSE Poetry - Love & Relationships, topic 5.1.3
Key Quotes: Neutral Tones
Here are some examples of key quotes from Hardy's Neutral Tones:
‘The deadest thing’
- ‘The smile on your mouth was the deadest thing’.
- The narrator uses juxtaposition (a smile being 'the deadest thing') to show the incompatibility of the lovers.
‘Keen lessons...'
- ‘Keen lessons that love deceives / And wring with wrong, have shaped to me / Your face’.
- Alliteration in ‘wring with wrong’ and assonance in the line ‘keen lessons that love deceives’ creates a bitter sneering tone, reflecting the narrator’s bitterness towards his past relationship.
Key Poems for Comparisons With Neutral Tones
Here are some suggestions for poems you could compare Neutral Tones to. Remember, there are endless options!
Winter Swans
- Compare the way in which an estranged couple is presented.
- Contrast the lack of reunion or resolution in Neutral Tones with the reunion in Winter Swans.
When We Two Parted
- Compare:
- The bitter tones of the two poems.
- Their use of wintry weather to show the end of a relationship.
Love's Philosophy
- There is a contrast between the depiction of the beginning and end of a relationship.
- Hardy explores a relationship in its final stages in Neutral Tones. This is not a poem like Shelley’s Love’s Philosophy, which is filled with novelty and excitement.
Test yourself on Key Quotes & Comparisons
Which of these quotations uses alliteration?
What adjective best describes the narrator's tone?
‘Keen lessons that love deceives / And wring with wrong, have shaped to me / Your face’What's the weather like in When We Two Parted and Neutral Tones?
How are both sets of lovers presented in Winter Swans and Neutral Tones?