ABSTRACT

Stylistics, understood as the linguistic description of literary texts, is regarded with suspicion by many literary scholars. The author proposes, therefore, to take up a position intermediary between the linguist and the literary scholar and, as far as his competence permits, he will set linguistic evidence in correspondence with intuitive judgment, giving neither any particular priority. If a linguistic analysis really can contribute anything to an understanding of a poem over and above that promoted by the literary approach, then there ought to be something more to be said about the poem than has been said already. The sound of the harness bells, which might be said to suggest the world of human affairs, is contrasted with the sound of the wind in verse. At the beginning of the last verse, the word woods appear as the theme of the sentence in which it occurs.