Source identified1
“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.”
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 note: “Neutral Tones,” collected in Wessex Poems and Other Verses (1898), Project Gutenberg #3167. Hardy's landscape is part of a dramatic lyric memory, not a claim that winter inherently causes sadness.
Source identified2
“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.”
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 note: “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.