Source identified
Read & copy the quotation
“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.”
- Date
- 1898
Meaning of “We stood by a pond that winter day,…”
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.
Where does it come from?
‘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.
