How would you write a two-page, informal response to Tennyson's poem "Oenone," focusing on the ways in which the elemental and biological imagery of the poem mirrors/echoes the mood of Oenone himself?

As the poem opens, Oenone is sad and heartbroken that Paris, her husband, has left her for Helen. The nature around her reflects her depression by falling silent and drooping, just as she is doing. The imagery is deathlike: the words "quiet" and "silent" reflect the stillness of a corpse, the word "shadow," which can mean ghost or spirit, is repeated twice, and the word "dead" describes the winds. Finally, the flower "droops" as if it is as depressed as Oenone:

For now the noonday quiet holds the hill: / The grasshopper is silent in the grass: / The lizard, with his shadow on the stone, / Rests like a shadow, and the winds are dead. / The purple flower droops[...].

As the poem proceeds, Oenone recalls trying to compete for Paris's love. She pictures her love for him as like "the evening star" and also alludes to herself as a natural creature, a fawn, with a "playful tail." Here, in contrast to the first stanza, she is active, emotional, and full of energy. She compares her love of Paris to

quick-falling dew / Of fruitful kisses, thick as Autumn rains / Flash in the pools of whirling Simois!

Words like "quick," "thick," "flash," and "whirling," as well as the exclamation point, show her to be warm and active when she is remembering her love for Paris and his love for her. She likens herself to parts of nature that are fast-moving: the dew and the autumn rains that "flash" in whirling pools. She compares herself in her hot-blooded embrace with Paris to water swirling in motion. This is a sharp contrast to the dead and drooping nature all around her that she perceives after Paris has left her.
But as she returns to her grief, Oenone again speaks of the nature surrounding her in terms of deathlike imagery. She is, like her lost beloved Paris, a person who feels intense emotions. The beloved hills and woods, which she once enjoyed with Paris, she now describes as cut down:

they cut away my tallest pines,
My tall dark pines, that plumed the craggy ledge
High over the blue gorge.

Now, she experiences "ruin'd folds" and "fragments," as well as "dry thickets." Where once everything was "loud" and beautiful, Oenone perceives it now as somber and silent


Dead sounds at night come from the inmost hills,
Like footsteps upon wool.

Finally, the last stanza nature reflects her anger at Paris's betrayal. Nature becomes fire, a symbol of rage. Oenone states that


wheresoe'er I am by night and day,
All earth and air seem only burning fire.

She moves in the end from depression and grief to rage, pictured as a natural world of earth and air that seems to her now to be "only" fire.