Question 1: Identify a metaphor used in this extract and explain its effect.

Answer: The metaphor comparing love to shadows cast in a silent room emphasizes its disappearance and emotional coldness.

Question 2: What is the significance of the imagery describing the pond and winter landscape?

Answer: The imagery reflects emotional coldness, despair, and the end of a relationship.

Question 3: Identify the type of rhyme scheme in the stanza: 'day / gray' and 'weak / bleak'.

Answer: b) AABB

Question 4: Describe the tone of the poem and support your answer with a quotation.

Answer: The tone is melancholic and resigned, as evidenced by phrases like 'the silence hung heavy, bleak, and weak' and 'love that once belonged... is gone'.

Question 5: Identify a literary technique used in the line: 'The smile on your face was cold and thin'.

Answer: The technique is personification, attributing a 'cold and thin' smile to convey emotional coldness.

Question 6: Explain how Hardy's use of colour imagery (white, gray, bleak) contributes to the poem's mood.

Answer: The colour imagery creates a cold, desolate atmosphere that mirrors the emotional distance and loss in the poem.

Question 7: Identify and analyse a caesura used in the extract.

Answer: The caesura in 'And the silence hung heavy, bleak, and weak' creates a pause that emphasises the heaviness and emotional weight of silence.

Question 8: How does Hardy's use of diction contribute to the overall mood of the poem?

Answer: Words like 'bleak', 'cold', 'weak', and 'frozen' evoke a mood of despair and emotional numbness, reinforcing themes of lost love.

Question 9: Based on this extract, suggest one way Hardy might have used structure to reinforce the poem’s themes.

Answer: The use of repetitive, somber imagery and a consistent rhyme scheme reinforce the tone of melancholy and loss.