A week or so ago, in a car in the dark just before I got dropped off at my house, Lauren Greenspan (who’s a fellow student of mine) quoted to me these lines from Hardy:
“Your eyes on me were as eyes that move
Over tedious riddles solved long ago”
She said she’d read the poem at the beginning of the end of a relationship, and known exactly what Hardy meant; I knew exactly also, and have not been able to get the lines out of my head. It is an awful experience to feel as though someone sees you as a solved riddle, a mental game that was once interesting and mysterious, and has now lost its charm.
Tonight I looked up the full poem, and it struck me a little as Philip Larkin sometimes strikes me — when, for example, he says things like, “Until I grew up I thought I hated everybody, but when I grew up I realized it was just children I didn’t like” — so toweringly misanthropic that I feel the overpowering urge to giggle. Particularly the lines
“The smile on your mouth was the deadest thing
Alive enough to have strength to die”
in Hardy’s poem feel self-consciously excessive. Not that I don’t believe he felt them; I’ve felt things like them. But something makes me think that (in the midst of his despair) the corner of his mouth was twitching just a little when he titled the poem:
Neutral Tones
We stood by a pond that winter day,
And the sun was white, as though chidden of God,
And a few leaves lay on the starving sod,
– They had fallen from ash, and were grey.
Your eyes on me were as eyes that move
Over tedious riddles solved long ago
And some words played between us to and fro –
On which lost the more by our love.
The smile on your mouth was the deadest thing
Alive enough to have strength to die;
And a grin of bitterness swept thereby
Like an ominous bird a-wing…
Since then, keen lessons that love deceives,
And wrings with wrong, have shaped to me
Your face, and the God-curst son, and a tree,
And a pond edged with grayish leaves.