When we two parted + Neutral Tones

WWTP summary+context+themes

Summary: The speaker reflects on a painful parting from a former lover. The relationship was secret, and its ending brought in silence rather than public mourning. He recalls the coldness of their final kiss and the signs that foreshadowed his future

Context: Byron had to keep an affair hidden due to social conventions, meaning Byron could not publicly express his grief when it ended. He feels angry about societal oppression

Themes: Memory, Secrecy, Grief

NT summary+context+themes

Summary: The speaker recalls standing by a pond on a winter day with a former lover. The landscape is drained of colour. Everything reflects the lifelessness of their dying relationship.

Context: Hardy reflects personal experience of failed love. Hardy may believe that love is inherently deceptive.

Themes: Love, Bitterness, Memory

Loss in both

WWTP: ‘Pale grew thy cheek and cold,/Colder thy kiss;’

Death imagery conveys that the lover is lifeless. The physical description conveys emotional warmth has drained from the relationship. The comparative further intensifies the emotional withdrawal.

NT: ‘They had fallen from an ash, and were grey.’

Use of grey emphasises dead feelings and represents the absence of both love and hate. Grey connotates to isolation and depression. Fallen highlights separation and disconnection.

Both WWTP and NT use loss, however loss is depicted as more emotional in WWTP and physical in NT.

Memory in both

WWTP: ‘A knell in mine ear’

NT: ‘The smile on your mouth was the deadest thing’

Both poems use memory, but WWTP uses memory to convey ideas about grief, whearas NT uses memory to portray love as deceitful.