1. In Poem A, the woods is granted an agency of its own and interacts with the speaker throughout the narrative, offering itself as an alluring force that attracts the speaker as an alternative to his “reality”, while the speaker details his battle in resisting the attractiveness of the woods to his emotional state. The established individual agency of the woods is first established by the repeated use of the term “the woods” in the poem the speaker addresses the woods directly and comments on its scenery- the noun is used for four times in the short poem- “Whose woods these are”, “To watch his woods”, “between the woods” and “the woods are lovely…”. The poem, the woods represent the attractive force of soothing nature, presenting itself as a comforting and emolliating solution to the speaker’s anguish, torment and general fatigue towards life. The speaker lauds it “lovely, dark and deep”, and adopts auditory imagery to describe the soothing and sleep inducing tranquility and serenity that the silence of the woods offers- “The only other sound’s the sweep/ Of easy wind and downy flake.” This phrase also highlights and ease and comfort that the woods and the dark nature offers, with the words “easy” and “downy” connoting rest, oblivion and sleep as a desirable solution to the speaker’s obvious ennui and weariness towards his real life. The darkness of the woods are a prominent feature of its description and adds to the imagery of calming, somnolent darkness that the speaker so desires. However, the speaker eventually succeeds in resisting the “woods” promising attractiveness of oblivion and reminds himself of his worldly responsibilities and obligations in the conclusion of the poem- reiterating the fact that he has “promises to keep” and “miles to go before I sleep”, thus completing the speaker’s struggle in surrendering his will to is emotional needs.

2. Poem A consists of four stanzas made of short, rhythmic phrases that give a song- like quality to the poem. The poem adopts a complex rhyming scheme in which the first, second and fourth line of each stanza rhyme with each other, and the last word of the third line of each stanza rhymes with the subsequent stanza’s first second and fourth line. This structure is adopted to grant the poem a cyclical, repetitive nature, and the rhyming scheme works to emphasize the smoothness in transition and interconnectivity between the stanzas. The cyclical nature of the poem, with one stanza closely corresponding in sound to the next, gives the poem a drowsy, numbing effect that imitates the speaker’s weariness and fatigue in his experience in the woods. The smoothness in transition and similarity in sound patterns between stanzas are imperative to engendering an atmosphere of soothing smoothness and blanketing muteness akin to the softly drifting snowflakes that is gradually blanketing the woods, which highlights the comfort

and eradicative oblivion that the woods offers to the speaker. Poem B consists of three stanzas that each contains pattern of rhyming ABABCDEDCCE. The interlocking scheme

3. Auditory imagery is adopted in poem B in the third stanza, where the speaker composes a song of autumn and extols the fruitfulness of its harvest and expresses mournfulness towards its eventual passing. The speaker exclaims to autumn “thou hast thy music too”- and proceeds to detail the various noises produced by autumn’s animals. The speaker compares the otherwise infuriating shrills of gnats as the music of a “wailful choir” that mourns the autumn’s selfless sacrifice. This imagery is reminiscent of the solemn choirs present in funerals, while the adjective “wailful” depicts the shrill melancholic sound produced by autumn’s gnats. The speaker then describes a “full grown lambs loudly bleat from hilly bourn”, adopting an oxymoron that paints the picture of the stuttering immaturity of the children of autumn and their desperation and sadness at the passing of their mother. Finally, the speaker describes “Hedge crickets sing, and now with treble soft/ The red- breast whistles from a garden- croft,/ and gathering swallows twitter in the skies.”, again emphasizing the music extant in the landscape that intertwines to form a melodic elegy for the passing of autumn. Another notable feature of the auditory imager used in this stanza is the gradual decrease in intensity of the sound depicted- from the trilling, wailing “choir” of gnats, to the loud bleating of lambs, and finally to the soft echoes of birdcall in the last lines of the stanza, the auditory imageries on a whole serves to create a gently fading and receding effect on the poem that corresponds to the exhaustion and completion of autumn’s duties in harvest, and depicts the gentle transition of seasons.

4. The tone of the speaker in Poem A is solemn and melancholy. The isolation and loneliness of the speaker is -distance between civilization of speaker, isolation from other human influence and interaction- attractiveness of woods, darkness, frozen lake- little horse as companion that shakes speaker from his contemplation and lull towards the attractive woods-