MELANCHOLIC ORIENTATION OF THE POETRY “NEUTRAL TONES” BY THOMAS HARDY

Abstract

A large number of scientific works are devoted to the interpretation of aesthetic ideas of the poetry collection “Wessex Poems and Other Verses” (1898), and less attention is paid to each poem separately. The relevance of the study is due to the small number of works in Ukrainian and foreign literature on linguostylistic analysis of the lyrics “Neutral Tones” by Thomas Hardy with further substantiation of late Victorian English literature features. Therefore, the aim of this work is to study the dynamics of imagery in the work of art “Neutral Tones” and the embodiment of ideological and artistic ideas of the artist with phonics, stylistically coloured vocabulary, complex syntactic structures etc. The methodological basis of the study is the literary-critical works devoted to the study of the peculiarities of linguostylistic analysis of the literary text and foreign works of English researchers who investigated poetic works by T. Hardy through the prism of the poet’s private life. The method of scientific analysis and synthesis, the method of comparison, generalization and identification, historical-literary and system-functional methods were used in the scientific paper. This study showed that T. Hardy’s poem “Neutral Tones” has a gloomy tone that contrasts with hope. This is a characteristic feature of Victorian realistic texts. Feelings of melancholy and sadness are embodied in the depiction of the theme of separation through unhappy love. Within poetry technique T. Hardy experiments with size, feet, rhyme and line length. At the phonological level, the phenomena of alliteration and assonance influence melody structure and appeal to the recipient’s sensory perception. T. Hardy conveys the meaning and descriptions, by taking into account the denotative and connotative meaning of the word, as he uses different stylistic devices. At the syntactic level, a stanza is basically a complex sentence with subjunctive, conjunctive and/or incoherent connections, where there is a game with structural elements. In this way, we highlighted the main features of the poetry poetics and the tropics of “Neutral Tones” which characterize Thomas Hardy’s poetry individual style.