I Look into my Glass is a poem by Thomas Hardy.

Reading the title without reading the poem, I expect the poem may be a lyrical poem because it focusses the attention on something personal. Indeed in the tile there are the preposition “into” and the possessive “my”. Reading the poem I would find out why the poet is looking into his glass, so his feelings and moods.

The layout made me understand the text is a poem, because it is written in lines and not in prose. I notice the poem is arranged into three stanzas by the use of punctuation. The first stanza starts with the first line and finishes at the fourth line, the second stanza begins in the fifth line and ends in the eighth line, while the third stanza starts with the ninth line and finishes at the twelfth line. So every stanza id made of four lines each and in each one it is used the iambic pentameter.

Considering the first line, that is the same as the title, this composition is part of a collection. Indeed it is part of the Wessex Poems, written in 1898.

The speaker is talking about the reaction of growing and the emotions one feels when he gets older. Moreover the speaker voice introduces the old age theme through the pretext of looking himself into his mirror and seeing his wasting skin.

There are lots of words that belongs to the semantic field of the time: came to pass, grown, for then, grown, endless, time, eve and noontide. Therefore the word “Time”, that is capitalized, acquires a very important meaning, becoming a keyword. Time passes and it wastes everyone’s energy, look and beauty.

At the eleventh line, “fragile frame” is an alliteration with the repetition of the letter “f”, which makes me think of something broken. Furthermore, at the end of the poem there is a relevant metaphor: the word “eve”, which means “evening,” refers to the time before the night, that is the oldness before the death.