The tone of the poem “the bells” can best be described as

a)growing increasingly more cynical as the poem progresses
b)consistently hopeful and optimistic
c)formal and unemotional
d)moving from a stark criticism of humanity to a hopeful end

Letter A is the correct answer.

Explanation:

The Bells is a poem written by American author Edgar Allan Poe. There, the speaker experiments with onomatopoeic forms by repeating the same word (the rhetorical device could be classified as alliteration.)

Even the words chosen and the ambience they create at the beginning of the poem, the speaker changes the tone (by using different semantic fields, each of them more cynical than the previous one) in a progressive way, making correct letter A.