The bright leaves, which accentuate autumn, fall around me as I sit under a tall oak tree.  The air is chilly, biting at my hands and face, the only skin that is exposed.  Sitting there, I crack open my Norton Anthology of Poetry and turn to Thomas Hardy’s “Neutral Tones.”  Through reading this poem in an outside environment, the poem takes on another meaning, different than a meaning generated from an inside environment, such as a classroom.  The wind is blowing slightly. Fingers shake. Breath is almost frozen.

                       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 an ash, and were grey (1153).

           Winter. Gloomy. White. Bare trees.  Not quite what I am experiencing sitting under the oak tree on campus, but I can feel the coldness creep into my being.  Sitting out here makes me feel as though I am one with the poem.

                        Your eyes on me were as eyes that rove
                        Over tedious riddles of years ago;
                        And some words played between us to and fro
                        On which lost the more by our love (1153).

            I notice other college students mulling around me as I read.  The walkway is fairly close to the tree that has become my shelter on this autumn day.  Those mixed signals from long ago filter through me yet again; the words exchanged mean nothing

                     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 . . . (1153)

           Crooked smile. Seemingly cunning and ordinary at the same time.  If only I knew the thoughts going through your mind.  Was the moment ominous? Perhaps if I had only looked more closely at the signs.

                   Since then, keen lessons that love deceives,
                   And wrings with wrong, have shaped to me
                  Your face, and the God-curst sun, and a tree,
                  And a pond edged with greyish leaves” (1153).

           Ice-cold tears stream down my face. I am not back in that time, I am here in the present, under this autumn stricken tree on campus.  Poems bring me to other places, realities that once were and are now, when not engaging in a text, only enacted in the mind.

--the poem mentioned in this piece is from The Norton Anthology of Poetry, 5th edition, W.W. Norton, 2004, Thomas Hardy's "Neutral Tones"

Written for English Senior Seminar, Fall 2008

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Flower photo: Copyright Alicia, 2008 (Williamsburg, VA)
White Rose photo Copyright Alicia, December 2006 (Boston, MA)
"For when the traveler returns from the mountain-slopes into the valley, he brings, not a handful of earth, unsayable to others, but instead some word he has gained ... Perhaps we are here in order to say: house, bridge, fountain, gate, pitcher, fruit-tree, window--"

    --Rainer Maria Rilke's Durino Elegies
"Endless snarls of words, sometimes twisting into meaning, sometimes into nothing at all, frequently breaking apart, always branching off into other places I'd come across later -- on old napkins, the tattered edges of an envelope, once even on the back of a postage stamp; everything and anything but empty; each fragment completely covered with the creep of years and years of ink pronouncements; handwritten, typed; legible, illegible; impenetrable, lucid; torn, stained, scotch taped; some bits crisp and clean, others faded, burnt or folded and refolded so many times the creases have obliterated whole passages of god knows what -- sense? truth? decent? a legacy of prohpecy or lunacy or nothing of the kind? and in the end achieving, designing, describing, recreating -- find your own words; I have no more; or plenty more but why? and all to tell -- what?"
-- Mark Z. Danielewski's House of Leaves