On Teaching Thomas Hardy's “Neutral Tones”   ROGER CRAIK   The quiet of course conceals the pain. Light falters on a winter day. A pond is edged with grayish leaves. “The scene's appropriate,” I said. “The relationship's about to end. We all know how this feels,” I said. But wondering afresh I saw That bitter smile, those nerveless words, The damned-white sun, and after them The years beyond the poem's end When other women, never named, Fell out of love, left him in tears Until the poet, nearing death, Looked back on long decades of grief And took his pen to sketch in brief Her frowning face, the ash, the pond, That lifeless day from which there stemmed (He knows too late) a lifetime's truth. . . And thinking all of this, “I'm wrong!” I cried. “The poem lacerates beyond our lives. Relief is ignorance!” (The students stared.) “Not one of us can know the way this feels. The quiet of course cannot conceal the pain That Hardy knew but we, so far, are spared.” Roger Craik has worked in universities in England, Turkey and North Yemen, and now lives quietly in Ashtabula, Ohio. TLR Web home page