I Look Into My Glass by Thomas Hardy

Title
Just considering the title 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”.

Layout
Looking to the layout you can the text is a poem, because it is written in lines and not in prose. The poem is arranged into three stanzas by the use of punctuation. Each stanza id made of four lines each and in each one it is used the iambic pentameter.

Denotative analyis
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.

Connotative analysis
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.