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Difficulty: MediumFigurative Language Devices

Read the following poem by William Wordsworth (published 1807) carefully before choosing your answer:

London, 1802

1 Milton! thou shouldst be living at this hour:
2 England hath need of thee: she is a fen
3 Of stagnant waters: altar, sword, and pen,
4 Fireside, the heroic wealth of hall and bower,
5 Have forfeited their ancient English dower
6 Of inward happiness. We are selfish men;
7 Oh! raise us up, return to us again;
8 And give us manners, virtue, freedom, power.
9 Thy soul was like a Star, and dwelt apart:
10 Thou hadst a voice whose sound was like the sea:
11 Pure as the naked heavens, majestic, free,
12 So didst thou travel on life’s common way,
13 In cheerful godliness; and yet thy heart
14 The lowliest duties on herself did lay.

In lines 3-4, the speaker uses metonymy ("altar, sword, and pen, / Fireside") primarily to do which of the following?

  1. A
    voice Wordsworth's personal regrets regarding his own career as a poet and his family relationships
  2. B
    catalog the literal physical items that the speaker hopes to import to revitalize the country's economy
  3. represent the major social, religious, and domestic institutions of English life that have lost their moral integrityAnswer
  4. D
    mark a sudden shift to a celebratory tone regarding England's traditional political and religious power
  5. E
    suggest that the line break between line 3 and line 4 completely isolates the domestic sphere from the public sphere

Answer

The correct answer is the option stating that the metonymy represents the major social, religious, and domestic institutions of English life that have lost their moral integrity.
The correct answer accurately identifies that the concrete nouns "altar" (representing religion), "sword" (representing state or military force), "pen" (representing literature and intellectual endeavors), and "fireside" (representing home and family life) function metonymically to encompass all the defining institutions of English society. The speaker uses these to argue that every facet of English life has suffered a moral fall, losing its "ancient English dower / Of inward happiness."

Step-by-Step Solution

1
Identify the figurative language device in the specified lines.
The words "altar, sword, and pen, / Fireside" are identified as examples of metonymy, where concrete objects stand in for larger concepts or institutions.
Understanding the literal-to-figurative mapping is necessary to decode the speaker's message.
2
Map the metonymic symbols to their institutional referents.
"Altar" represents the church/clergy, "sword" represents the military or state power, "pen" represents literature and intellectual life, and "fireside" represents the home or domestic life.
This establishes the scope of the speaker's critique across both public and private spheres of English society.
3
Analyze the context of the poem to determine the purpose of these symbols.
The speaker declares that these entities "have forfeited their ancient English dower / Of inward happiness" and characterizes the people as "selfish men."
This contextualizes the metonymy within the speaker's lament about England's moral decline, showing that the devices function to highlight institutional decay.

Key Concept

Identifying and analyzing the function of metonymy in poetic texts.
Estimated Time:1m 30s
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Topics

Figurative Language Devices

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