Complicated Love
When Love Fails
Romantic love does not always last. Three poems in the Relationships collection examine what happens when love fades, fails or becomes something unrecognisable: Wordsworth’s “A Complaint,” Hardy’s “Neutral Tones” and Jennings’s “One Flesh.” Each poet presents disillusionment differently — through loss of emotional connection, through bitter memory, and through the quiet erosion of a marriage — but all three convey the pain of love that no longer sustains.
A Complaint — William Wordsworth (1807)
Wordsworth (1770–1850) is one of the founders of English Romanticism. “A Complaint” is believed to address his friend Samuel Taylor Coleridge, whose emotional withdrawal and opium addiction had strained their friendship. The poem mourns the loss of a deep emotional bond — not a romantic relationship, but a platonic love that was once sustaining and is now reduced to almost nothing.
Wordsworth uses an extended metaphor of a fountain to describe the relationship. It was once “a fountain at my fond heart’s door” “whose only business was to flow” — constant, generous, life-giving. Now it has been replaced by “A well of love — it may be deep — / I trust it is, — and never dry” — a well that may still exist but is hidden, inaccessible and uncertain. The shift from fountain (visible, overflowing) to well (underground, stagnant) captures the devastating change.
Key language: The dashes in “it may be deep — / I trust it is, — and never dry” create hesitation and doubt. The speaker is trying to convince himself that the love still exists, but the broken syntax reveals his uncertainty. The word “trust” is loaded — trust is precisely what has been damaged.
Key structure: The poem has three stanzas: past (the fountain), present (the well), and reflection. This chronological movement from abundance to scarcity mirrors the deterioration of the relationship. The regular metre and rhyme scheme create a controlled, measured tone that contrasts with the emotional pain beneath — Wordsworth keeps his composure even as he mourns.
Neutral Tones — Thomas Hardy (1867)
Hardy (1840–1928) wrote this poem at 27, drawing on a painful romantic experience. It describes a moment when two lovers stand by a pond, recognising that their love is dead. The poem is a memory, recalled years later, and the bitter, stripped-back imagery reflects the speaker’s enduring pain.
Key language: “We stood by a pond that winter day, / And the sun was white, as though chidden of God” — the pathetic fallacy is immediately established. The sun is not warm or golden but “white” and punished (“chidden”), drained of all vitality. The pond, the leaves, the sky — everything in the landscape is bleached and lifeless, reflecting the death of feeling between the lovers.
The simile comparing the lover’s gaze to someone looking at “tedious riddles” is devastating. The word “tedious” suggests boredom and irritation — the speaker has become a puzzle the lover no longer cares to solve. “Rove” implies the eyes wander without focus, suggesting the lover is mentally absent. The speaker is right there, but emotionally the lover has already left.
Key structure: Like Keats’s “La Belle Dame Sans Merci,” Hardy uses a cyclical structure. The poem begins and ends at the pond, with the final stanza: “And a pond edged with greyish leaves.” This return traps the speaker in the memory — he cannot escape the moment when he realised love had died. The four regular quatrains rhyme ABBA, so every stanza closes on the sound it opened with, creating a deceptively orderly surface that barely contains the bitterness beneath.
The title “Neutral Tones” is deeply ironic. There is nothing neutral about the poem — it is suffused with bitterness and pain. The “neutral” refers to the drained, colourless landscape and the empty feelings between the lovers, but the speaker’s enduring memory of this moment, decades later, proves that the emotions were anything but neutral.
One Flesh — Elizabeth Jennings (1966)
Jennings (1926–2001) was the only female member of “The Movement,” a group of 1950s English poets who rejected Romantic excess in favour of clarity, restraint and understatement. “One Flesh” describes her elderly parents lying apart in bed, their marriage intact in name but emotionally distant. The title alludes to the Biblical phrase from Genesis 2:24 (“and they shall be one flesh”) — though Jennings’ poem inverts the ideal, showing a couple who are physically apart rather than united.
Key language: “Lying apart now, each in a separate bed, / He with a book, keeping the light on late” — the opening is deliberately mundane. The couple is separated physically (different beds) and mentally (he holds a book he does not read, she lies “like a girl dreaming of childhood”). Yet the word “now” implies this was not always the case — the distance has grown over time. “Tossed up like flotsam from a former passion” is a powerful simile: flotsam is wreckage left after a storm, suggesting their current state is the remnant of a love that once had the force of a tempest.
This paradox captures the central mystery of long marriages. The couple are physically and emotionally distant (“apart”), yet bound by decades of shared history (“close together”). The repetition of “strangely” suggests that even the speaker — their own child — cannot fully understand the nature of this bond. It is neither love nor not-love, neither together nor separate. Jennings presents long-term relationships as irreducibly complex.
Key structure: Three regular six-line stanzas with a quiet, understated tone. The regularity of the form mirrors the routine of the couple’s life — predictable, orderly, but lacking passion. The final stanza shifts from observation to reflection: “Whose fire from which I came, has now grown cold?” This question acknowledges that the speaker’s own existence was the product of passion that no longer exists — a deeply unsettling realisation.
Comparing the Three Poems
Different stages of love’s decline: Wordsworth mourns a love that has recently withdrawn (the fountain has just become a well). Hardy bitterly remembers the exact moment love died (by the pond). Jennings observes the long aftermath of love’s slow erosion (her parents in old age). Together, they trace a full arc: loss, death, and the long, quiet aftermath.
Tone contrast: Wordsworth is measured and controlled; Hardy is bitter and ironic; Jennings is contemplative and sad. These tonal differences reflect different relationships with disappointment — Wordsworth still hopes, Hardy has given up, Jennings simply observes with quiet puzzlement.