We stood by a pond that winter day,
The opening line situates the poem on a bleak winter day. As a whole, the poem is a glimpse into a past moment that clearly had a significant emotional impact on the speaker, but the opening line does not yet reveal this. The relationship between the characters is also not clarified until later (the end of the second stanza). The language in this first line is bland and slightly unspecific, reflecting the neutral and passive nature that the speaker presents. This is also supported by the line's rhythm, which is iambic apart from the anapest "by a." The regularity of this rhythm contrasts with other lines in the poem, such as "And a few leaves lay on the starving sod."
The smile on your mouth was the deadest thing
Alive enough to have strength to die;
And a grin of bitterness swept thereby
Like an ominous bird a-wing . . .
Here, the speaker suggests that he is haunted by his ex-lover's face at the moment of their break-up. A smile is meant to convey warmth, contentment, and friendliness, but the smile on the ex-lover's face communicates the opposite. This mirrors the way the speaker presents a facade of neutrality while his bitter anger boils inside. The ex-partner's smile articulates the moment that the relationship dies and becomes an ill harbinger for the speaker's future perspective on love. The dead smile is replaced with a "bitter grin" that the speaker compares to an ominous bird taking flight, showing how the end of the relationship transforms the ex-lovers. Ominous birds in flight often portend death, sickness, and calamity. Indeed, this whole ordeal seems to have forever closed the speaker off to love and the joy of being with another.
Since then, keen lessons that love deceives,
And wrings with wrong, have shaped to me
"Neutral Tones" is not just the speaker's remembrance of a break-up, but also a meditation on how this experience has marked his life. The end of the speaker's relationship with his ex-lover is a defining moment that shapes his perspective about love. Love from that point forward will not be associated with optimism, but will rather signal the arrival of deception, immorality, and endings. Something "keen" is sharp and well-defined, meaning that the speaker is not likely to change his mind. The concept of love has been soaked through with grievance, and the speaker intends to wring this wrong from his life.
