The Son’s Veto

by Thomas Hardy

The Son’s Veto: Style 1 key example

Part II
Explanation and Analysis:

Hardy’s writing style in “The Son’s Veto” is, at the level of prose, lyrical and poetic. He uses long, complex sentences that are full of imagery and figurative language. The following passage—in which the narrator introduces readers to Sophy’s teenaged son Randolph—captures Hardy’s lyrical and flowing style:

Somehow, her boy, with his aristocratic school-knowledge, his grammars, and his aversions, was losing those wide infantine sympathies, extending as far as to the sun and moon themselves, with which he, like other children, had been born, and which his mother, a child of nature herself, had loved in him; he was reducing their compass to a population of a few thousand wealthy and titled people, the mere veneer of a thousand million or so of others who did not interest him at all.