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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 grayish leaves.
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“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 grayish leaves.”

Thomas Hardy

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Source
Neutral Tones — Thomas Hardy
Date
1898
Meaning

Meaning of “Since then, keen lessons that love deceives, And…”

The speaker remembers a painful relationship through the landscape that surrounded it, showing how later experience can fuse emotional lessons with particular natural images.

Source context

Where does it come from?

“Neutral Tones,” Wessex Poems and Other Verses; Project Gutenberg #3167. The statement belongs to the poem's speaker and should not be treated as Hardy's universal doctrine that love deceives.

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Themes

Ideas connected with this quotation

LifeLife AdviceLife LessonsNatureRelationshipSadBroken HeartMemories
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Márgarét, áre you gríeving Over Goldengrove unleaving?
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“Márgarét, áre you gríeving Over Goldengrove unleaving?”

Gerard Manley Hopkins · Spring and Fall · 1918
Meaning & context

Hopkins begins with a child grieving autumn leaves and gradually widens that feeling into a meditation on human awareness of loss, change and mortality.

Source details

“Spring and Fall: to a young child,” written in 1880 and published posthumously in 1918, represented by Poetry Foundation. Margaret is the poem’s addressed child; the meditation is literary and theological rather than a clinical account of grief development.

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Blessings emblazoned that day Everything glowed with a gleam; Yet we were looking away!
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“Blessings emblazoned that day Everything glowed with a gleam; Yet we were looking away!”

Thomas Hardy · The Self-Unseeing — Thomas Hardy · 1901
Meaning & context

Looking backward reveals value that was not fully noticed while the moment was being lived, giving the remembered family scene both warmth and regret.

Source details

“The Self-Unseeing,” Project Gutenberg #3168. The exclamation closes a poem of retrospective domestic memory and should not be detached from that remembered household scene.

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Snow-bound in woodland, a mournful word, Dropt now and then from the bill of a bird, Reached me on wind-wafts.
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“Snow-bound in woodland, a mournful word, Dropt now and then from the bill of a bird, Reached me on wind-wafts.”

Thomas Hardy · Postponement — Thomas Hardy · 1898
Meaning & context

A winter bird-call reaches the speaker inside a snowbound wood, giving a postponed meeting an atmosphere of distance, waiting and subdued natural sound.

Source details

“Postponement,” collected in Wessex Poems and Other Verses (1898), Project Gutenberg #3167. The poem's landscape frames a delayed relationship encounter and is not generic weather description.

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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.
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“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.”

Thomas Hardy · Neutral Tones — Thomas Hardy · 1898
Meaning & context

A drained winter landscape mirrors the emotional coldness of a failing relationship, with pale sun, dead leaves and barren ground shaping the poem's remembered scene.

Source details

‘Neutral Tones,’ in Wessex Poems and Other Verses, Project Gutenberg #3167. ‘We stood by a pond that winter day’ opens Hardy's four-stanza dramatic lyric, whose drained winter landscape becomes part of the speaker's memory of a failed relationship. The landscape is poetic imagery, not evidence that winter or particular natural scenes cause sadness.

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She had been forced into prudence in her youth, she learned romance as she grew older: the natural sequel of an unnatural beginning.
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“She had been forced into prudence in her youth, she learned romance as she grew older: the natural sequel of an unnatural beginning.”

Jane Austen · Persuasion · 1818
Voice: Narrator voice · Narrator
Meaning & context

The narrator summarizes Anne’s development as a reversal: excessive caution shaped her early choice, while experience later teaches her to value warmer confidence and attachment.

Source details

Persuasion, Chapter IV, Project Gutenberg #105. This is narrator commentary after Anne reconsiders the engagement she ended at nineteen under Lady Russell’s persuasion.

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