My literary analysis of the poem “I Look into my Glass”.

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

Starting from the title, I expect the poem to concern a speaking voice looking at himself/herself (looking into his/her “glass”, so facing his/her own reflection) and maybe even confronting his/her own decisions made in the past.

The layout shows that the text is divided into 3 quatrains (3 stanzas of 4 lines each) and that it presents an alternation between dialogues and narration. Also, the word “Time” (line 9) is capitalized, so it will certainly play an important role in the story.

The narrating voice stares into his/her own reflection and notices his/her wrinkly skin, which he/she refers to as “wasting”, making us understand that he/she is living at an old age. He/She wishes that his/her heart had shrunken as much as his/her body had because it cannot cope with the strong emotions that he/she is feeling. All the speaking voice wishes is that his/her heart had grown cold as his/her body, so that he/she could wait his/her death in peace. Although he/she is old, he/she is feeling the same feelings that he/she had felt when young: the good and the bad.

So, the main message is the contrast between the aging of the body (which turns cold) and the vitality of the heart.

The ABAB rhyme scheme and the punctuation give musicality to the poem, which has a malinconic and thoughtful tone. Also, each rhyming expression does not only share a phonological level but even a semantic one: in the first stanza, for example, the words “glass” and “pass” both refer to the image of the narrator’s skin turning older and weaker, same for “skin” and “thin”. The first stanza is also defined by a monologue of the narrator towards God, where he/she sounds desperate: this underlines the malinconic tone of the entire context.

In the second one, the isolation of “I” (line 5) draws the reader’s attention to the situation of the narrator, who would rather isolate himself/herself from his/her sorroundings (by doing this, he/she would not feel feelings anymore). The alliteration of the letter “o” in expressions such as “grown” and “cold” conveys you the feeling of a big and mysterious sense of loneliness and sadness that whoever is speaking is dealing with.

The last stanza starts with two lines who make you feel the contrast between Time’s functions: it is stealing the narrator’s body but letting his/her heart live on. Time is personified to make its role feel more important to who is reading, being it the most important feature in the poem. In conclusion, the last two lines of this stanza present the final contrast of the extract which is the one between the words “eve” (which represents the end of life) and “noontide” (representing youth). Also, the use of the letter “b” in the word “throbbings” lights up the scene, referring to these intense emotions his/her heart still feel and will most definitively feel until the very end.