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            Thomas Hardy, a Victorian poet, attempts to discover the meaning of love through his poetry.  He realizes that this emotion frequently changes both positively and negatively, establishing both forced and true love.  Although love exists in everyone’s lives, Thomas Hardy proves that one cannot define love because time changes one’s perception of love and leads to the revelation of its multiple natures. Hardy uses paradoxes, the motif of weather, and sound devices to portray the discrepancies between one’s perception and the reality of true love.

            Hardy uses various paradoxes to exemplify the multiple sides of love as he attempts to discover its true meaning.  In “Revulsion,” Hardy discovers that “[f]or winning love we win the risk of losing, / And losing love is as one’s life were riven” (5-6) because through this development of love, people have a higher chance of feeling heartbroken.  The ideas of “winning” and “losing” are paradoxes, portraying a duality in love.  By “winning love,” one increases the chances of “losing” it, causing his life to seem “riven,” or torn apart.  People often connect “winning” to happiness, while “losing” has more of a negative connotation.  Because love is both a “win” and a “los[s],” Hardy understands affects a person both positively and negatively.  Young adults naively think that love lasts forever; however, as a person matures, he realizes that his feelings toward the relationship change, leading to an end of true love.  Hardy discovers that through maturation, one determines the multiple natures of love.  In his “Unknowing,” a couple thinks that their love will endure time.  The speaker “deemed [their love] endless” (7) because of their immaturity; however, their “lives seemed shattered” (15) as they grow older.  The paradox between “endless” and “shattered” demonstrate the discrepancy between the appearance and the reality of the duration of love.  The contrast between “deemed” and “seemed” refer to appearance versus reality; however, Hardy reverses the actual appearance versus reality with the one that the lovers see, creating another distinction between fact and imagination.  The immaturity of the speaker prompts him to believe that his love never ends, but the actual state of his passion for the girl is “shattered.”  This paradox between looks and facts portray the inconsistent and temporary natures of love, leading to the fluctuating emotions that go with these changes.

            These fluctuations prove love is inconsistent because after maturity shifts one’s perceptions, one admires another while the latter does not return the veneration. In Hardy’s “Neutral Tones,” the speaker dates girl for a long time and discovers that he does not love her as he did before.  Because the speaker feels that the relationship decreases in its vitality and freshness, he believes that “[t]he smile on [her] mouth was the deadest thing / Alive enough to have strength to die” (9-10).  The contrasting ideas of “deadest” and “[a]live” portray the discrepancy between initial thought and deep understanding.  At the beginning of the relationship, the speaker finds himself looking at “the smile on her mouth” because that characteristic draws his attention in a positive fashion.  This “smile” once looked “alive,” but because the speaker matures, he begins to feel differently.  Since the “smile” seems like “the deadest thing,” the speaker begins to think of the girl in a negative way.  “[S]trength to die” refers not only to the girl’s smile, but also to their relationship.  The death of the smile elucidates both the girl’s unhappiness and the speaker’s discontent with the relationship as each person starts to dislike each other for the slightest reasons. This dissatisfaction reveals the disjunction in the sharing of love for each other, which occurs after the speaker’s emotional development, changing his preferences.  While positive aspects of love become negative ideas, the appearance of love as endless fades as one realizes the truth as he matures.  Because this love fades away, one cannot use something unchanging to associate with love, which Hardy further exemplifies with weather.

            Hardy uses weather to portray the difficulty of determining the meaning of love in his poems because he uses the aspects of this idea as symbols for the various impressions of love.  Turbulent weather patterns portray the difficult times of a relationship because each relationship progresses with disagreement, describing its instability. The “gust and gale” (15) in Hardy’s “A Spot” disturb the positive connotation of nature as arguments and harsh times interfere with the mutuality of love.  As the “gust and gale” potentially cause damage to society as the disorder in shared emotions destroy a relationship.  As minor problems or disinterest in the relationship grow, the “gust” suddenly inflates the magnitude of each problem, causing one’s attachment to that relationship seem as too much effort for a small reward.  In Hardy’s “I Need Not Go,” the speaker says:

             I need not go

            Through sleet and snow

            To where I know

            She waits for me (1-4).

He decides to do this because he does not love the girl who loves him for he desires to wait until he feels passion for her.  The speaker knows that the girl “waits for [him]” because she loves him; however, the speaker will “not go” to find her until he desires her.  The “sleet and snow,” which symbolize the difficulties in forcing himself to love her, prevent him from seeking her.  The speaker receives less reward for the trouble he must overcome to gain a stable relationship.  These peculiar weather patterns illustrate the difficulty in finding an overarching meaning of love because each aspect of weather corresponds to a unique perspective of this emotion while the contrasting patterns depict contrasting views of love.
            Just as contrast in weather patterns occurs frequently due to nature, one’s experience with love alters as one matures.  Hardy uses variation in weather patterns to parallel the continual differentiation the appearance versus reality in relationships.  Because the speaker in Hardy’s “I Need Not Go” does not want to travel “Through sleet and snow” (2), the girl “will wait [him] there / Till [he] find it fair” (5-6).  “[F]air” refers to both the mutual love and the weather, paralleling how love has different meanings for specific points of view at various times.  The “sleet and snow” contrast with the “fair,” offering a correlation with various stages in love because the “sleet and snow” refer to incompatibility and discord while “fair” relates to peace and happiness.  The disparity in love mimics that of the weather, giving a clear comparison between love and physical aspects of the world.  The change from “sleet and snow” to “fair” climate demonstrates the speaker’s decision to wait for a change in his preferences due to a higher level of maturity.  The juxtaposition of “the sun and the shadows” (”A Spot” 11) and “Foul days and fair” (”A Spot” 13) portray the various notions that result from the different phases of love.  ”[S]un” and “fair” refer to light, which adds to a positive mood; however, when juxtaposed with “shadows” and “foul” respectively, the negative weather descriptions counteract the positive mood, instigating a sense of confusion and discord during the many junctures of a relationship.  The positive and the negative moods associated with weather expose love’s oscillating significance at distinctive points in an affair, which Hardy explains through alliteration.
            Hardy’s use of alliteration exemplifies the multiple natures of love as the repetition of different vowels represents dissimilar consequences of love on a person.  The contrast between hard and soft sounds in “Revulsion” produces a tone of confusion.  The distinction between “w,” which has a fragmented sound, and “l,” which has a flowing sound, parallels a period stability followed by unsteadiness in a relationship.  Hardy also uses the hard “c” sound when he describes the losing of love as “cut[ting] like contumely and keen ill-using” (7).  This hard “c” sounds similar to cutting, referring to a disruption in the mutuality of love.  Maturation leads to this disruption “cutting” apart the relationship “contumely,” meaning with disdain or scorn.  Hardy’s “A Spot” describes a couple that finds themselves “[l]it by a living love” (3) because each believes that the other returns the love, but the discordant and harsh “f” and “g” sounds portray the reality that this expectation is not met.  This alliteration not only associates the sounds with a jarring mood, but also emphasizes these words.  While love appears to “liv[e],” “Foul days and fair” (13) coexist with “gust and gale,” (15) creating a mood of confusion.  This appearance acts as the surface of a deeper conflict of disharmony even though the speaker thinks of the “love” as “living.”  This frequent use of alliteration delineates the subtlety of love’s changes over time because the alliteration allows for a deeper understanding of the hidden conflict under the seemingly harmless appearance of love.

            Both alliteration and assonance also portray this subtlety of eagerness and restlessness relating to a relationship.  Hardy’s use of these sound devices in “Between Us Now” illustrates the change from excitement to worry and tension.  The speaker “see[s] the scenes slide past” (5) and notices “[t]he daytimes dimming fast” (6) as he recalls the memories of the good times.  This alliteration of the “s” and the “d” along with the word choice of “slide” and “fast” form a sense of speed, leading to a mood of slight excitement.  However, the assonance of the long “o” sound as Hardy writes that “swift things have grown slow” (22) displays a mood of bore.  Just as the “swift” moments that fade at the beginning of a new relationship “[grow] slow” after time passes, the rhythm of the poem slows down to parallel a relationship.  Hardy uses alliteration to represent the relative speed of time at the start of a relationship and assonance to prolong the time near the end of that relationship.  This combination of eagerness and restlessness also describe the anger that results from these fluctuations.  In Hardy’s “I Said To Love,” the speaker states that love acts as “iron daggers of distress” (20).  Through this use of alliteration, Hardy emphasizes the speaker’s anger because this causes him to speak both loudly and quickly.  “[D]agger of distress” flows off the tongue, creating a mood of deep hatred for love because the speaker uses describes love as a source of “distress.”  This anger over both love’s effects and the fluctuations of a relationship illustrates the inconsistencies of love.

            The difficulty in finding a constant result from love creates discrepancies between what one thinks of love and its reality at that moment and skews one’s emotions and senses.  While Hardy discovers various ideas about love through his use of paradoxes, weather, and sound devices, he cannot consistently define love.  People’s presumptions that they truly understand love are frequently false, so one must be careful of his assumptions about love, or he will feel disappointed when discovering that this varying emotion not only manipulates a relationship, but also controls him negatively.