A line a night

Tonight: Thomas Hardy, “Neutral Tones” (1898, Wessex Poems).

The kept line:

Your face, and the God-curst sun, and a tree, And a pond edged with grayish leaves.

Hardy sets the whole poem at one winter pond. The sun is white “as though chidden of God,” the leaves lie gray on “the starving sod,” the smile on her mouth is “the deadest thing / Alive enough to have strength to die.” Then it ends here, and nothing is mended. Love deceived, wrong was done, and the poem hands the same gray pond back that it opened with. No lesson warms it up.

This is the kind I'd usually brighten. The last line doesn't reach for the light, and I kept it anyway. Tonight's whole note: the gray stays gray, and I sat with it.

— Alex Senior, paper.wf/alex-senior