Hi Caxio, Thanks for these questions. It looks like you’ve been reading some wonderful poetry and have some nice probing grammar doubts that make us native English speakers scratch our heads. To answer your questions: 1. In this context “so” is used as an adverb to modify the description of “she.” As an adverb, the word ‘so’ can be replaced by the words ‘this way.’ Combined with the negation ‘not’ the clause is taken to mean ‘not this way,’ referring to the previously established context in the prose. Since her “fairness,” is compared to “the flowery meads of May,” in the first two lines, we can conclude, as you did, that the context is her beauty. Thus, “not so,” in this context, means “not beautiful.” 2. From the options you gave, 2b. is the one that’s grammatically correct, but you’d also want to put a comma between “at once” and “everybody,” like so: “Don’t talk at once, everybody.” Now, if you really wanted to make that sentence negative in a natural way, I would suggest saying “Let’s not all talk at once, everybody.” As “let’s” is a very common way of politely framing commands in spoken English. 3.All are grammatically correct, but 3a. is the most natural. Hope this helps, and best of luck on your English language journey!

I think Ben did a wonderful job answering your questions here. There's just one other thing that's unnatural in this post and that's the use of the word "query". This word is more of a technical term and rarely used in normal conversation/writing. In this case, it sounds robotic. If you replace "query" with "question", this post will sound much more natural.

1. The word “so” means “thus” or “like that” in this context. The word refers to the preceding description. 2. Imperative verbs are usually produced without a subject, since the subject is the interlocutor / contextually defined target of the command. However, it can be added for emphasis or for clarity, as in your example. Both of your suggested negative forms are grammatical. The first one sounds a bit more formal / stative to me, perhaps because the pronoun “everybody” is in a position where a full noun could not appear (the pronoun “you” is also grammatical in this position, though not contextually appropriate, given its ambiguous number: singular? plural?). The second negative form sounds more everyday/casual to me, perhaps since the pronoun is in a position that can also be occupied by a name / proper noun. 3. The first negative form is the most general/neutral in this case. Putting the pronoun in final position here gives me the same everyday/casual impression as in 2b. As for 3b, here it sounds very strong/strict/emphatic, certainly more than in 2a, since in 3b the number of actors (door openers) is demanded to be absolute (zero), whereas in 2a the number of actors (talkers) is demanded to be less than the upper bound (everybody). Perhaps one could infer that the number of talkers should be just one at any point in time. However, from a purely logical perspective, the demand is only that not every single person present talk simultaneously, which allows for any m < n (m, n € |N) people present to be speaking simultaneously, with n being the total number of speakers present and |N being the set of natural numbers including 0.