Poetry II
127 questions
Read the following lines from Alfred, Lord Tennyson's poem "Ulysses" (1842):
18 I am a part of all that I have met;
19 Yet all experience is an arch wherethrough
20 Gleams that untravelled world whose margin fades
21 Forever and forever when I move.
22 How dull it is to pause, to make an end,
23 To rust unburnished, not to shine in use!
24 As though to breathe were life! Life piled on life
25 Were all too little, and of one to me
26 Little remains; but every hour is saved
27 From that eternal silence, something more,
28 A bringer of new things; and vile it were
29 For some three suns to store and hoard myself,
30 And this gray spirit yearning in desire
31 To follow knowledge like a sinking star,
32 Beyond the utmost bound of human thought.
In lines 19–21 ("Yet all . . . I move"), which of the following best describes the primary effect of the syntactical inversion in the clause beginning with "wherethrough"?
Consider the following poem:
Our separate lives are like a balance scale,
Hung from the beam of destiny on high;
When sorrow makes your heavy heart prevail,
And sinks your pan beneath a weeping sky,
My lighter side must instantly ascend,
Not in light joy, but drawn by tension's thread,
For every sigh that down your cup doth send
Lifts mine in sympathy to winds overhead.
We are bound fast by this gold fulcrum's law:
We cannot both at once be high or low;
Your downward grief is my ascending awe,
Our motions matched in equal, silent woe.
In the poem, how does the extended metaphor of the balance scale function to develop the speaker's portrayal of the relationship?
The dial turns, a slow
drift through copper dust and
static, the high whistle of cold
currents scraping against the speaker.
For a moment, nothing
but the sea's dry hiss,
then a voice
crystallizes:
brief, bright,
carrying a language we do not speak,
yet we hold our breath,
as if the sound itself
could mend the distance
between two shores.
In the poem, how does the lineation of the lines 'then a voice / crystallizes:' primarily contribute to the development of the speaker's experience?
Read the following poem:
1 Beneath the vault of quiet night,
2 Where stars their silent vigil keep,
3 A traveler seeks the fading light
4 Of dreams that vanish in his sleep.
5 To minds by heavy care oppressed,
6 No gentle balm does nature yield;
7 The troubled soul finds little rest
8 In empty wood or barren field.
9 Yet onward through the dark he goes,
10 Though paths are dim and hope is cold,
11 Until the eastern horizon glows
12 With morning's first, triumphant gold.
In lines 5–6 ('To minds . . . yield'), the syntactical inversion of the sentence structure functions primarily to do which of the following?
Read the following excerpt from Emma Lazarus's sonnet "The New Colossus" (1883) carefully:
Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame,
With conquering limbs astride from land to land;
Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand
A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame
Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name
Mother of Exiles.
In the excerpt, which of the following best describes the primary function of the speaker’s allusion to "the brazen giant of Greek fame" (line 1)?
Read the following poem carefully:
Within the silent chambers of the mind,
A tireless weaver plies her secret loom,
Where gold and silver threads are intertwined
To drape the walls of memory's quiet room.
She blends the bright silks of our happiest days
With darker wool of sorrow and of dread,
And in the complex pattern she displays,
No joy is spun without a somber thread.
By this slow craft, the tapestry is made,
Where light and shadow share an equal part;
The fairest pictures are the ones that fade
To leave their woven imprint on the heart.
Which of the following best describes the function of the extended metaphor of the weaver and the loom?
Read the following poem carefully:
(1) The flour rises in a dry cloud,
(2) settling on the dark wood of the table.
(3) I bring my hands down,
(4) press,
(5) fold,
(6) stretch the yielding dough
(7) until it resists.
(8) There is no clock here
(9) to measure the breathing of the yeast,
(10) only the slow, warming weight
(11) expanding under the cloth,
(12) finding its own shape
(13) in the quiet.
Which of the following best describes the primary thematic effect of the poem's free-verse structure and open form?
Read the following excerpt from a poem:
(1) The ink begins to dry upon the page,
(2) A final word left hanging in the air
(3) Unspoken; now the bird within its cage
(4) Beats at the bars in sudden, wild despair.
In lines 2–3 ('A final... Unspoken;'), the line break after 'air' and the semicolon after 'Unspoken' primarily serve to do which of the following?
Read the following poem by Emily Dickinson (1890):
The morns are meeker than they were—
The nuts are getting brown—
The berry's cheek is plumper—
The Rose is out of town.
The Maple wears a gayer scarf—
The Field a scarlet gown—
Lest I should be old-fashioned,
I'll put a trinket on.
In the first stanza of the poem, how does the speaker use personification to depict the transition of the seasons?
Read the following stanza from William Butler Yeats's poem "When You Are Old" (1893):
When you are old and grey and full of sleep,
And nodding by the fire, take down this book,
And slowly read, and dream of the soft look
Your eyes had once, and of their shadows deep;
In the stanza, how does the syntactic structure of the first two lines primarily contribute to the tone and meaning of the passage?
Read the following poem carefully before answering the question.
To graft the wild plum to the sweeter stock
Requires a wound, a clean and sharp incision,
Where wood meets wood, defying nature's lock,
To bind two separate lives in single vision.
The binding clay must seal the severed bark,
Lest the cold wind or searching rain should sever
The silent union working in the dark,
Till sap runs free, and two are joined forever.
So does our friendship grow from secret scars,
Where different stems are bound by sorrow's thread;
We drink the light of selfsame quiet stars,
Though sprung from roots in different soils spread.
How does the speaker develop the conceit of grafting (lines 1-8) to characterize the relationship described in the final stanza (lines 9-12)?
Read the following poem carefully:
Within the granite tower of the mind,
I trim the wick and turn the heavy brass,
Lest the thick fog of passion strike me blind
And shatter this fragile lantern-pane of glass.
The sea below, a roiling beast of grief,
Beats at the rock-ribbed base with cold disdain,
Seeking to lure the vessel on the reef,
While I keep vigil o'er the watery plain.
Though storms would drown the solitary spark,
The oil of reason feeds the steady flame,
To light the shifting channels of the dark
And guide the errant thoughts that have no name.
The speaker’s development of the lighthouse conceit primarily serves to convey which of the following?
Read the following poem carefully before choosing your answer.
Sonnet 73
[1] That time of year thou mayst in me behold
[2] When yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang
[3] Upon those boughs which shake against the cold,
[4] Bare ruin'd choirs, where late the sweet birds sang.
[5] In me thou seest the twilight of such day
[6] As after sunset fadeth in the west,
[7] Which by and by black night doth take away,
[8] Death's second self, that seals up all in rest.
[9] In me thou see'st the glowing of such fire
[10] That on the ashes of his youth doth lie,
[11] As the death-bed whereon it must expire
[12] Consum'd with that which it was nourish'd by.
[13] This thou perceivest, which makes thy love more strong,
[14] To love that well which thou must leave ere long.
How does the structural division between the three quatrains (lines 1–12) and the concluding couplet (lines 13–14) function to develop the poem's theme?
Read the following simulated poem carefully:
The Watcher at Ithaca
The loom is silent in the dusty hall,
The tapestry half-woven, green and gold,
Where once she sang of Ilium’s final fall
And watched the graying web of life unfold.
No traveler knocks, no suitors dare to tread
Upon the cold stone where the shadow creeps;
She unravels every night the silent thread,
While under foreign stars her shepherd sleeps.
Thus does she mock the swift, relentless loom,
And by her stalling hand, stave off the crown,
Transforming patient waiting to a doom
More bitter than the towers burning down.
In the context of the poem, the allusion to the mythological figure who "unravels every night the silent thread" primarily functions to do which of the following?
Read the following poem carefully before choosing your answer.
The frost has mapped the windowpane in lines
As sharp and cold as geometric law,
Locking the garden’s skeletal designs
In winter’s pale, unyielding grip and claw.
(5) No bird disputes the silence of the lawn;
The sky is iron, pressed against the clay.
We watch the light, by early shadows drawn,
Relinquish what remains of sterile day.
And yet, the hearthfire stirs a sudden scent
(10) Of summer pine, or cedar split in June—
A fragrance that, by some strange accident,
Restores the warmth of that high afternoon
When we ran wild through fields of clover-gold,
Forgetful of the dark, and of the cold.
In the poem, which of the following best describes the function of the transition in line 9 ("And yet...")?
Read the following lines from Thomas Hardy's poem "The Darkling Thrush" (1901):
The land's sharp features seemed to be
The Century's corpse outleant,
His crypt the cloudy canopy,
The wind his death-lament.
Which of the following best describes the function of the speaker's personification of the landscape and the passing century?
Read the following passage carefully before choosing your answer.
(1) The map is not the territory, yet
(2) We trace the borders with a careful hand,
(3) Believing lines of ink can stay the threat
(4) Of shifting tides. We claim the solid land
(5) Is ours—until the sudden, sharp arrest
(6) Of punctuation marks the silent coast;
(7) The sea respects no clause; the waves divest
(8) Our syntax of the things we valued most.
In lines 5–6 ("until the... coast"), what is the primary function of the enjambment between "arrest" and "Of punctuation"?
Read the following passage from a poem:
1 The tide climbs high along the rocky steep,
2 And pauses—as a breath held in suspense—
3 Before the downward rush, the sudden leap
4 Of waters seeking their obedience
5 To ancient moons. We watch the foam-lines break
6 Upon the shore; they shatter and erase
7 The fragile shapes our hurried footsteps make,
8 Leaving no path behind us, and no trace.
In lines 5-6 ("We watch... shore"), how does the enjambment affect the reader's interpretation of the scene?
Read the following excerpt from Dylan Thomas’s villanelle "Do not go gentle into that good night" (1951) carefully:
[1] Do not go gentle into that good night,
[2] Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
[3] Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
[4] Though wise men at their end know dark is right,
[5] Because their words had forked no lightning they
[6] Do not go gentle into that good night.
[7] Good men, the last wave by, crying how bright
[8] Their frail deeds might have danced in a green bay,
[9] Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
In the second stanza (lines 4–6), how does the enjambment at the end of line 5 ("they") contribute to the meaning of the passage?
Read the poem below carefully:
Why should I blame her that she filled my days
With misery, or that she would of late
Have taught to ignorant men most violent ways,
Or hurled the little streets upon the great,
Had they but courage equal to desire?
What could have made her peaceful with a mind
That nobleness made simple as a fire,
With beauty like a tightened bow, a kind
That is not natural in an age like this,
Being high and solitary and most stern?
Why, what could she have done, being what she is?
Was there another Troy for her to burn?
In the context of the poem as a whole, the allusion to Troy in the final line ('Was there another Troy for her to burn?') serves to achieve which of the following effects?