Read the following poem carefully before answering the question.
1 The prism-glass, aligned to sweep the sound,
2 Keeps vigil through the blind and salt-torn night;
3 It turns its heavy brass gears round and round,
4 Dividing darkness with a blade of light.
5 No vessel calls to thank the steady eye,
6 No sailor names the hearth that keeps him free;
7 The beam ignores the wind’s descending cry
8 To write its lonely circles on the sea.
9 But morning brings a silence more profound:
10 The lamp goes cold, the gears relax their strain,
11 And shorebirds gather on the granite ground
12 To peck at flies along the copper vane.
13 The keeper walks the gallery, and sees
14 Not ships, but tide-pools where the urchins cling,
15 And leaves the empty air to salt and breeze,
16 Content to watch a small, unbeaconed thing.
In the poem, how does the transition between the first stanza (lines 1–8) and the second stanza (lines 9–16) primarily shift the focus of the speaker?
- AIt shifts from the speaker's bitter resentment of the lighthouse's isolation to a celebratory and joyful praise of morning on the coast.
- BIt shifts from a chronological log of the keeper's active duties at night to a literal list of the ships that have arrived safely in the harbor.
- It shifts from an active, mechanical effort to impose order on a vast, indifferent environment to a quiet, localized observation of the natural world.Answer
- DIt shifts from the poet's personal anxiety about guiding readers through difficult works to a resolution to simplify their own writing style.
- EIt shifts from a series of personifications describing the light to a list of metaphors characterizing the shorebirds' behavior.