Sunday, January 19, 2014

What do you think the title of the poem means?

First, the phrase "Neutral Tones" literally describes the images in the poem: the whiteness of the sun and the grayness of the leaves, both of which appear at the beginning and end of the poem. White and gray are neutral tones. They aren't bold, loud, exciting colors; they're muted, simple, subtle ones.


More to the point, though, "Neutral Tones" is about the speaker being rejected by someone who used to love him, and so the title also works to describe the lack of feeling that this person has for the speaker. In other words, the girl's feelings and expressions are neutral toward the speaker: unloving and totally without intensity. (He describes her smile as bitter and dead and compares it to an ominous bird flying away.)


Interestingly, "Neutral Tones" also works as an ironically inaccurate description of the speaker's feelings in the poem. Although the girl who rejected him feels neutral, the speaker himself clearly feels a deep despair. If you were to assign a color to his feelings, you might pick a dark red or a deep black. "Neutral Tones" stands in ironic contrast, then, with the speaker's intensely felt sense of loss and disappointment.

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