Poetry II
127 questions
Read the following poem carefully before choosing your answer.
1 The needle acts as scribe to silk and bone,
2 Retracing orbits that the moth forgot,
3 Where saints in faded indigo and stone
4 Are bound within a tight, domestic knot.
5 For hours, she mends the border’s ancient frayed
6 Decay, her fingers mimicking the dead
7 Who stitched their brief devotion in the shade
8 Of quiet rooms, with dyed and heavy thread.
9 She seeks to cure the rot of centuries,
10 To freeze the fading timber of their prayer,
11 Imposing order on the tapestry's
12 Old wilderness of hunters and the hare.
13 But at the margin where the wool runs thin,
14 A sudden, jagged slash of crimson shows
15 Not where the weaver’s pattern should begin,
16 But where the spear-point split the painted rose;
17 The quiet thread of artifice is torn,
18 And through the gap, the living scream is born.
Which of the following best describes the function of the transition that begins in line 13?
Read the following poem carefully:
The Prophet in the Marketplace
We watched her stand beside the granite sill,
Crying of fires no other eye could trace,
While commerce hummed and wagons climbed the hill,
And shadows lengthened on the market square.
We bartered wool and weighed the common gold,
Deaf to the rising wind that swept the bay,
And laughed to hear the frantic threat she told
Of towers fallen in a single day.
Like her who walked the wrecked and smoking street
Of Priam's town, she speaks to ears of stone,
Her truth a coin that buys no safe retreat,
Her vision left to burn and fade alone.
In the third stanza, the allusion to 'her who walked the wrecked and smoking street / Of Priam's town' primarily serves to do which of the following?
The following passage is an excerpt from John Donne's poem 'A Valediction: of Weeping' (1633).
1 Let me pour forth
2 My tears before thy face, whilst I stay here,
3 For thy face coins them, and thy stamp they bear,
4 And by this mintage they are something worth,
5 For thus they be
6 Pregnant of thee;
7 Fruits of much grief they are, emblems of more,
8 When a tear falls, that thou fall'st which it bore,
9 So thou and I in each other's sphere
10 As tears, which are things of nothing, do appear.
11 On a round ball
12 A workman that hath copies by, can lay
13 An Europe, Afric, and an Asia,
14 And quickly make that, which was nothing, All;
15 So doth each tear,
16 Which thee doth wear,
17 A globe, yea world, by that impression grow,
18 Till thy tears mix'd with mine do overflow
19 This world, by thee made more; thy heaven dissolved so.
In the transition from the first stanza (lines 1–10) to the second stanza (lines 11–19), the speaker's development of the conceit involving tears primarily serves to do which of the following?
Read the following poem, "London, 1802" by William Wordsworth, first published in 1807:
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 13–14 ("and yet thy heart / The lowliest duties on herself did lay"), the inverted syntactical structure primarily serves to do which of the following?
Read the following lines from W. H. Auden’s poem "As I Walked Out One Evening" (1937):
In the burrows of the Nightmare
Where Justice naked is,
Time watches from the shadow
And coughs when you would kiss.
In headaches and in worry
Vaguely life leaks away,
And Time will have his fancy
To-morrow or to-day.
In the passage, the personification of Time as an observer who 'watches from the shadow' and 'coughs when you would kiss' primarily serves to do which of the following?
Read the following poem carefully before choosing your answer.
The brush removes the centuries of clay,
Revealing ribs aligned in limestone sleep,
Where cold, impartial calipers assay
The measurements that dark and silence keep.
We tag the femur, catalogue the spine,
And map the ancient strata of the stone,
Reducing prehistoric design
To numbers on a grid of dust and bone.
But as the evening shadows stretch and fade
Across the quiet, temporary floor,
A sudden, phantom weight begins to tread,
And timber shakes behind the laboratory door—
The quiet hall becomes a primal shore,
Where giant steps displace the ancient sea,
And what was dust is monument once more,
Reclaiming its forgotten majesty.
In the poem, how does the shift in tone and imagery starting in line 9 ("But as...") alter the depiction of the fossil?
1 The ink is dry, a faded iron brown,
2 Locked in the grammar of a forgotten tongue.
3 I trace the syntax, wearing down the noun,
4 To find what songs the buried choir sung.
5 For hours, the lexicon is my sole guide,
6 Through cases, tenses, declensions of the dead,
7 Where ancient kings and silent gods abide,
8 And history hangs by a fragile thread.
9 But here, beneath a margin damp with age,
10 A sudden smudge of hurried soot appears:
11 A scribe’s brief comment scrawled across the page—
12 'The night is cold, and I am full of fears.'
13 The lexicon falls silent on the desk;
14 The kings depart their dry and dusty tombs.
15 No longer distant, formal, or grotesque,
16 A living voice breathes in these quiet rooms.
In the poem provided, the speaker’s relationship with the ancient manuscript undergoes a significant transition beginning in line 9 ("But here..."). Which of the following best describes how this shift is developed?
Read the following lines from William Wordsworth's sonnet 'The World Is Too Much With Us' (1807):
The world is too much with us; late and soon,
Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers;—
Little we see in Nature that is ours;
We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!
In line 3, how does the inversion of standard grammatical syntax ('Little we see...') contribute to the meaning of the stanza?
Read the following poem carefully before answering the question.
My heart is but a clock of brass and steel,
Whose gears are wound by Hope’s persistent hand;
The wheels of habit turn the heavy wheel,
And measure hours we cannot understand.
But Love, the mainspring, is too tightly coiled,
And Pride, the regulator, rules too deep;
The delicate escapement has been soiled
By tears of grief that silent watchers weep.
No craftsman can adjust the balance spring,
Or oil the pivots where the friction lies;
It strikes the hour with a hollow ring,
Then falters in its ticking, and it dies.
For when the key of thy regard is lost,
The mechanism freezes in the frost.
Which of the following best describes how the speaker develops the conceit of the heart as a clockwork mechanism over the course of the poem?
Read the following poem by William Wordsworth carefully before choosing your answer.
The World Is Too Much With Us
The world is too much with us; late and soon,
Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers;—
Little we see in Nature that is ours;
We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!
This Sea that bares her bosom to the moon;
The winds that will be howling at all hours,
And are up-gathered now like sleeping flowers;
For this, for everything, we are out of tune;
It moves us not.—Great God! I’d rather be
A Pagan suckled in a creed outworn;
So might I, standing on this pleasant lea,
Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn;
Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea;
Or hear old Triton blow his wreathèd horn.
In lines 8–9 ("For this, for everything, we are out of tune; / It moves us not.—Great God! I’d rather be"), how does the placement of the transition (caesura and enjambment) within line 9 rather than at the line break reinforce the poem's thematic development?
Read the following lines from Sylvia Plath's poem "Mirror" (1961):
I am silver and exact. I have no preconceptions.
Whatever I see I swallow immediately
Just as it is, unmisted by love or dislike.
I am not cruel, only truthful—
The eye of a little god, four-cornered.
In the context of these lines, the personification of the mirror as an entity that 'swallows' and is 'unmisted by love or dislike' serves primarily to do which of the following?
Read the following lines from Christina Rossetti's poem "Song" (1862):
When I am dead, my dearest,
Sing no sad songs for me;
Plant thou no roses at my head,
Nor shady cypress tree:
Be the green grass above me
With showers and dewdrops wet;
And if thou wilt, remember,
And if thou wilt, forget.
In the final two lines, the parallel structure of the clauses ("And if thou wilt, remember, / And if thou wilt, forget") functions primarily to do which of the following?
Read the following lines from Percy Bysshe Shelley's poem "The Cloud" (1820):
I wield the flail of the lashing hail,
And whiten the green plains under,
And then again I dissolve it in rain,
And laugh as I pass in thunder.
In these lines, how does the speaker’s personification of the cloud primarily function to convey the relationship between nature and the world below?
Read the following poem carefully before choosing your answer.
The glassblower's breath is a shape
before it meets the iron rod,
a warm draft of air
held in the throat, then released
to expand against the cooling room,
stretching the orange globe
until the walls are thin as paper,
vulnerable to the slightest touch,
yet holding
the shape of the breath
long after the fire has gone cold.
In the final lines of the poem, the isolation of the phrase "yet holding" on its own line chiefly serves to do which of the following?
Read the following poem carefully before choosing your answer.
1 Within the brass precision of the wheel,
2 He frames the quiet minutes, tooth by tooth;
3 No pulse of wind or winter can he feel
4 Who bounds the hours in search of metal truth.
5 Beneath his lens, the tiny gears engage,
6 A silent orbit in a crystal dome;
7 He marks the steady march from youth to age,
8 Yet keeps his own small, static world at home.
9 But when the bells of St. Jude's start to chime,
10 Shaking the dust from rafters overhead,
11 He looks beyond the glass, escaping time,
12 To watch the shadows that the poplars shed,
13 And hears, in every wild, erratic beat,
14 The uncalibrated music of the street.
In the context of the poem as a whole, the shift in focus in line 9 ("But when...") primarily serves to transition the poem from which of the following?
Read the following lines from John Keats’s poem "Ode on Melancholy" (1819):
She dwells with Beauty—Beauty that must die;
And Joy, whose hand is ever at his lips
Bidding adieu; and aching Pleasure nigh,
Turning to poison while the bee-mouth sips:
Ay, in the very temple of Delight
Veil'd Melancholy has her sovran shrine,
In the passage, how does the personification of "Beauty," "Joy," and "Pleasure" function to develop the speaker's main theme?
Read the following poem, "Ozymandias" by Percy Bysshe Shelley (1818):
1 I met a traveller from an antique land,
2 Who said—"Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
3 Stand in the desert. . . . Near them, on the sand,
4 Half sunk a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
5 And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
6 Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
7 Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
8 The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed;
9 And on the pedestal, these words appear:
10 "My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings;
11 Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!"
12 Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
13 Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare
14 The lone and level sands stretch far away.
In lines 6–8 ("Tell that . . . heart that fed"), which of the following best describes the grammatical relationship between "passions" (line 6) and "The hand . . . and the heart" (line 8)?
Since thou art gone, my heart is made a prism,
Through which thy single beam of love must pass;
No longer white, but split by sorrow's schism,
It scatters hues upon the darkened grass.
The red of anger, violet of despair,
And yellow hope that fades as soon as born,
Are flung in wild confusion through the air,
From that clear light that once did me adorn.
Yet though these varied passions paint the day,
They show but parts of what was whole before;
Oh, gather up thy scattered beams, I pray,
And make me white and single-souled once more.
In the poem, how does the development of the prism conceit throughout the poem convey the speaker's emotional trajectory?
Carefully read the subsequent passage from Matthew Arnold's "Dover Beach" (1867) prior to selecting your response:
Only, from the long line of spray
Where the sea meets the moon-blanched land,
Listen! you hear the grating roar
Of pebbles which the waves draw back, and fling,
[5] At their return, up the high strand,
Begin, and cease, and then again begin,
With tremulous cadence slow, and bring
The eternal note of sadness in.
Sophocles long ago
[10] Heard it on the Ægean, and it brought
Into his mind the turbid ebb and flow
Of human misery; we
Find also in the sound a thought,
Hearing it by this distant northern sea.
How does the speaker's allusion to Sophocles in lines 9–14 function within the context of the poem's theme?
Read the following poem by Edgar Allan Poe (1809–1849) carefully:
To Helen
Helen, thy beauty is to me
Like those Nicéan barks of yore,
That gently, o'er a perfumed sea,
The weary, way-worn wanderer bore
To his own native shore.
On desperate seas long wont to roam,
Thy hyacinth hair, thy classic face,
Thy Naiad airs have brought me home
To the glory that was Greece,
And the grandeur that was Rome.
In the second stanza, the speaker's allusion to 'Naiad airs' (line 8) functions primarily to do which of the following?