The poems under study are Neutral Tones (“NT”) and I Look in my Glass (“Glass”). Both poems focus on loss of a different kind: "Glass" expresses the loss of Hardy's youth; "NT" focuses on the death of Hardy's ex-wife, he mourns the loss of their love. Although the losses are different, both poems use the vehicle of time to express Hardy's sadness, "Glass" through the passing of a day and "NT" through the passing of the seasons. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on “Why Violent Video Games Should Not Be Banned”? Get an original essay In “Glass,” the verbs cleverly emphasize the passage of time and the pain of losing Hardy’s youth. In the first two lines, "look" and "see" are both in the present tense: Hardy is both literally looking in his mirror and looking at himself figuratively, being both retrospective and introspective. However, at the sight of his aging skin, time quickly passes. Hardy wishes his heart were as “thin” as his “wasting skin.” He wishes his heart were not so full of feeling and passion, that it had the moderate and impartial feelings of an old man; because then it wouldn't hurt if someone didn't reciprocate his feelings. In the final stanza, he returns to the present, and the verbs he uses here emphasize both his pain and his passivity. Time, personified, is the aggressor and takes away his physical youth. The assonance of the last stanza underlines the aggression of time, as does the sudden acceleration of the rhythm in the last two lines and the use of active verbs ("shakes", "pulsations"). Hardy feels alone, unloved, and slightly betrayed by the "hearts have grown cold for me." If his heart were not so passionate, he could then approach old age and death without distress, with serenity. He regrets that this is not the case and that even though his body is old, he still has the feelings of a young man. He thinks that time has been malicious in taking away his youthful appearance while retaining all his feelings. The poem is dominated by contrasting images of the day before and noon, of inner youth and outer decadence. He compares his body to the end of a day, while his emotions are at the meridian. Passion, which is at its peak, seems to shake the “fragile framework” of the body. Hardy projects the image of a person suffering passively at the hands of others through expressions such as "hearts have grown cold to me" and "Time, to make me cry". In “NT,” Hardy uses the seasons to convey time. He begins by describing winter in the past tense. He describes it as dull, gray and lifeless. All of this is a metaphor for the consequences of his relationship with his wife, describing the lack of feelings between them, where once there was joy and warmth. He speaks of "the hungry turf", insinuating that there is no food, no warmth, no comfort. His use of words such as “fallen” and “hungry” highlight the death of the love that once existed between them. Hardy deliberately does not describe his wife in the first stanza, preferring instead to describe the bleakness of the scene. This sadness is also highlighted by the lack of movement and energy seen throughout this stanza. He then goes on to describe his wife's eyes as cold, indifferent, bored, and perhaps a little perplexed (as to whether she had always loved Hardy). They passed on some social niceties to each other, but those words rang even more hollow because of the lack of warmth, love, and intimacy that once existed between.