Frost

Question 1

No quote‘The frost of death’‘passive flower
’Hymnal metricalityconceit

“Secure your flower”
command

‘like soldiers fighting with a leak, we fought mortality’
Militaristic simile + inclusive lang

‘To sea..Tomountain…to the sun.’ + ‘to crawl the frost begun’Anaphora Enjambment + inversion

Answer 1

→Belies speaker’s panic in the face of deathDeath (masc)= cold assassin / life (fem / in singular sense) = flower →Death = imperious + taunting→‘we’ + militaristic imagery →humanity’s effortful but futile attempts to prevent death→Repeated attempts use nature’s benevolence to revive flower but nature = indifferent for ‘to crawl the frost begun’ Enjambment 7 →8 creates lexical crawl from one line to the next / inversion makes ‘to crawl’ fronted. This all dramatizes insidiousness + inevitability frost’s (death’s) arrival

Question 2

Addition of extra line S3 lack of dashes“pried” + “wedged”
Metrical + punctuation featuresDynamic verbs

‘easy as the narrow snake, he forked’SimileVerb connotations

Answer 2

→renders concrete speaker’s futile attempt to wedge themselves btw. Frost + flower / removal lacunae prevent penetration death→kinetic verbs = desperate physical effort resist death→death easily breaches all defenses/ ‘forked’ = malicious, serpentine connot→(ext): death in nature = masc(phallic imagery) →speakerrails against death but also all-encompassing patriarchal structures inimical to female liberation∴1stcontour reveals speaker’s despattempt to prevent death, resulting in discovery of death’s brutal inevitability + hostility in nature + failure romantic + trans. Philosophical traditions which would remove sting of death