Poetry III

Read the following passage from John Donne's "The Triple Fool" (1633):

I am two fools, I know,
For loving, and for saying so
In whining poetry;
But where's that wise man, that would not be I,
If she would not grieve?
Then as th' earth's inward narrow crooked lanes
Do purge sea water's fretful salt away,
I thought, if I could draw my pains
Through rhyme's vexation, I should them allay.
Grief brought to numbers cannot be so fierce,
For he tames it, that fetters it in verse.

Which of the following best describes the shift in the speaker's tone over the course of the passage?

Carefully read the poem below, which focuses on the work of museum conservators, and answer the question that follows.

The Conservator's Ledger

We place the porcelain carefully on the shelf,
And catalog each fracture with a pen,
Lest we should run the risk of grief itself
Disturbing order we have made for men.
5 The dust is quiet, smelling of the room
Where someone wept before the clay was fired;
We measure shadows in the cabinet's gloom
And label what the long-deceased desired.
It is a sacred custody, we claim,
10 To keep these fragile vessels from the air,
Yet in the ledger, registering a name,
We trace the shape of our own long despair:
A quiet trade of beauty for a wall,
Which shields the living, lest the ruins fall.

In the poem, how does the speaker’s shifting persona develop the thematic conflict between clinical preservation and emotional reality?

Read the following poem carefully before choosing your answer.

The Hearth-Stone

Upon the cold and silent hearth-stone lies
A single ember, wrapped in greyest ash,
That neither flares to meet the winter skies
Nor fades beneath the rain’s persistent lash.
For years the ashes grew, a heavy shroud (5)
To keep the spark from blowing into flame,
While outside, winds of summer cried aloud
And seasons went as quickly as they came.
It is no spark to warm a drafty room,
Nor beacon lit to guide a traveler home; (10)
It is a secret kept against the gloom,
A quiet fire that burns to burn alone.

In the context of the poem as a whole, the "single ember, wrapped in greyest ash" (line 2) functions primarily as a symbol of which of the following?

Read the poem below by John Keats (1795–1821), published in 1848:

When I have fears that I may cease to be
Before my pen has gleaned my teeming brain,
Before high-piled books, in charactery,
Hold like rich garners the full ripened grain;
When I behold, upon the night’s starred face,
Huge cloudy symbols of a high romance,
And think that I may never live to trace
Their shadows with the magic hand of chance;
And when I feel, fair creature of an hour,
That I shall never look upon thee more,
Never have relish in the faery power
Of unreflecting love;—then on the shore
Of the wide world I stand alone, and think
Till love and fame to nothingness do sink.

In the poem, the transition in the final two and a half lines ("then on the shore...") primarily functions to resolve the speaker's thematic argument by doing which of the following?

Read the following excerpt from George Herbert's poem "The Collar" (1633):

Away! take heed;
I will abroad.
Call in thy death's-head there; tie up thy fears;
He that forbears
To suit and serve his need
Deserves his load.
But as I raved and grew more fierce and wild
At every word,
Methought I heard one calling, Child!
And I replied, My Lord.

How does the sudden structural shift in lineation and rhyme scheme in the final four lines (lines 7–10) function in relation to the poem's thematic development?

Read the following excerpt from Edward Taylor’s seventeenth-century poem "Huswifery" carefully:

Make me, O Lord, thy Spining Wheele compleate.
Thy Holy Worde my Distaff make for mee.
Make my Affections thy Swift Flyers neere
And make my Soule thy Spindle to bee.
My Conversation make to be thy Reele
And yarn the twine of thy Wheele.

Make me thy Loome then, knit therein this Yarn:
And make thy Holy Spirit, Lord, winde it:
Then weave the Web himselfe. The yarn is fine.
Thine Influence this Action will receive:
Then cloath therewith mine Understanding, Will,
Affections, Judgment, Conscience, Memory

Which of the following best describes the function of the spinning wheel and loom conceit in the excerpt?

Read the following passage from John Donne's poem "A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning" (1633):

Our two souls therefore, which are one,
Though I must go, endure not yet
A breach, but an expansion,
Like gold to airy thinness beat.

If they be two, they are two so
As stiff twin compasses are two;
Thy soul, the fixed foot, makes no show
To move, but doth, if the other do.

And though it in the center sit,
Yet when the other far doth roam,
It leans and hearkens after it,
And grows erect, as that comes home.

Such wilt thou be to me, who must,
Like th' other foot, obliquely run;
Thy firmness makes my circle just,
And makes me end where I begun.

In the passage, the speaker’s transition from the metaphor of beaten gold (lines 1-4) to the extended conceit of the twin compasses (lines 5-16) develops the central thematic argument by doing which of the following?

Read the following poem by Robert Frost, published in 1928:

I have been one acquainted with the night.
I have walked out in rain—and back in rain.
I have outwalked the furthest city light.

I have looked down the saddest city lane.
I have passed by the watchman on his beat
And dropped my eyes, unwilling to explain.

I have stood still and stopped the sound of feet
When far away an interrupted cry
Came over houses from another street,

But not to call me back or say good-bye;
And further still at an unearthly height,
One luminary clock against the sky

Proclaimed the time was neither wrong nor right.
I have been one acquainted with the night.

How does the poem's structural form, specifically its use of terza rima and a concluding couplet, contribute to the development of the speaker's emotional state?

Read the poem carefully, then answer the question.

The Cable and the Tide

Under the grey, salt-crusted pier,
The dark tide pulls the kelp aside,
And crabs in silent circles steer
Through shadows where the limpets hide;
A cold, unmastered rhythm beats
Against the timber, green with slime,
As every surging wave retreats
To mock the measured tick of time.

But overhead, the copper lines
In humming conduits, straight and dry,
Transmit in neat, unseen designs
A million voices to the sky.
No dampness mars the plastic sleeve,
No seaweed grips the copper thread;
Above the wash, the signals weave
A clean, immortal path instead.

Which of the following best describes the thematic function of the juxtaposition between the coastal tide beneath the pier and the copper conduits overhead?

Upon the window sill it holds the light, (1)
A silent wedge of glass, precise and cold,
That gathers in the undivided white
And breaks it into ribbons, bright and bold. (4)

No color of its own does it possess,
Yet every hue is captured in its core,
A quiet witness to the sun's excess, (7)
It scatters rainbows on the dusty floor.

But when the evening draws its shadow-line
And turns the window to a wall of slate, (10)
The crystal sits, a dark and muted sign,
Content to let the fading day abate. (12)

In the third stanza (lines 9-12), the prism’s transition from scattering vibrant colors to sitting as a 'dark and muted sign' functions symbolically to suggest which of the following?

Read the poem 'Design' (1922) by Robert Frost:

I found a dimpled spider, fat and white,
On a white heal-all, holding up a moth
Like a white piece of rigid satin cloth—
Assorted characters of death and blight
Mixed ready to begin the morning right,
Like the ingredients of a witches' broth—
A snow-drop spider, a flower like a froth,
And dead wings carried like a paper kite.

What had that flower to do with being white,
The wayside blue and innocent heal-all?
What brought the kindred spider to that height,
Then steered the white moth thither in the night?
What but design of darkness to appall?—
If design govern in a thing so small.

Which of the following best describes how the final line ('If design govern in a thing so small') modifies the poem's central thematic argument?

Read the following poem excerpt carefully:

"I would rather be the rough and silent bark
Than the green garland on a victor's brow;
Let the slow rings of wood compile my dark,
Immune to praise, forgotten by the plow.
He took the leaf to crown his own defeat,
And sang of chase, of triumph, and of grace,
While I, secure in sap and root's retreat,
Erase the memory of his golden face."

In the poem, the speaker's allusion to the laurel wreath ("the green garland on a victor's brow") and the myth of Daphne and Apollo functions intertextually to do which of the following?

Read the following lines from Percy Bysshe Shelley's sonnet "Ozymandias" (1818):

And on the pedestal these words appear:
"My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!"
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.

In the context of the poem, how do the lineation and punctuation of the line "Nothing beside remains. Round the decay" function structurally and thematically?

Read the following poem carefully before answering the question.

The chisel yields to what the frost began,
Chipping the marble down to human form,
Yet leaving rough the shoulder and the hand
To face the onset of the coming storm.
(5) We sculpt our monuments of ancient grief,
And carve the weeping stone to match our own,
But find no solace in the brief relief
Of Niobe’s cold, unyielding, tear-washed throne.
For though she wept until her flesh was rock,
(10) She kept the quiet custody of pain;
While we, who stand before the ticking clock,
Dissolve in silence, wishing for the rain.

In the context of the poem, which of the following best describes the function of the allusion to Niobe (line 8)?

Read the following poem by William Blake (published in 1794) carefully before choosing your answer:

I was angry with my friend;
I told my wrath, my wrath did end.
I was angry with my foe:
I told it not, my wrath did grow.

And I waterd it in fears,
Night & morning with my tears:
And I sunned it with smiles,
And with soft deceitful wiles.

And it grew both day and night.
Till it bore an apple bright.
And my foe beheld it shine,
And he knew that it was mine.

And into my garden stole,
When the night had veild the pole;
In the morning glad I see;
My foe outstretchd beneath the tree.

In the poem, how does the extended metaphor of the growing tree develop the speaker's thematic argument about repressed anger?

Read the following excerpt from John Donne's seventeenth-century poem "A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning" carefully:

If they be two, they are two so
As stiff twin compasses are two;
Thy soul, the fixed foot, makes no show
To move, but doth, if the other do.

And though it in the center sit,
Yet when the other far doth roam,
It leans and hearkens after it,
And grows erect, as that comes home.

Such wilt thou be to me, who must,
Like th' other foot, obliquely run;
Thy firmness makes my circle just,
And makes me end where I begun.

In the passage, how does the speaker's development of the drafting compass conceit contribute to the poem's thematic argument about the lovers' separation?

Read the following lines from the opening of John Milton's epic poem *Paradise Lost* (1667):

Of Mans First Disobedience, and the Fruit
Of that Forbidden Tree, whose mortal tast
Brought Death into the World, and all our woe,
With loss of Eden, till one greater Man
Restore us, and regain the blissful Seat,
Sing Heav'nly Muse...

In these lines, how does the use of enjambment most directly affect the reading of the passage?

Read the following poem by Walt Whitman carefully:

A noiseless patient spider,
I mark’d where on a little promontory it stood isolated,
Mark’d how to explore the vacant vast surrounding,
It launch’d forth filament, filament, filament, out of itself,
Ever unreeling them, ever tirelessly speeding them.

And you O my soul where you stand,
Surrounded, detached, in measureless oceans of space,
Ceaselessly musing, venturing, throwing, seeking the spheres to connect them,
Till the bridge you will need be form’d, till the ductile anchor hold,
Till the gossamer thread you fling catch somewhere, O my soul.

Which of the following best describes how the extended metaphor of the spider's filament-spinning functions to develop the poem's thematic portrayal of the human soul?

Read the following lines from Emily Dickinson’s poem "We grow accustomed to the Dark," first published in 1890:

We grow accustomed to the Dark—
When Light is put away—
As when the Neighbor holds the Lamp
To witness her Goodbye—

A Moment—We step uncertainly
For newness of the night—
Then—fit our Vision to the Dark—
And meet the Road—erect—

In the second stanza, the combination of lineation and punctuation (specifically the dashes and the enjambment between lines 5 and 6) primarily functions to do which of the following?

Read the following seventeenth-century poem, "The Windows" by George Herbert, carefully:

Lord, how can man preach thy eternal word?
He is a brittle crazy glass;
Yet in thy temple thou dost him afford
This glorious and transcendent place,
To be a window, through thy grace.

But when thou dost anneal in glass thy story,
Making thy life to shine within
The holy preachers; then the light and glory
More rev'rend grows, and more doth win;
Which else shows waterish, bleak, and thin.

Doctrine and life colors and light in one
When they combine and mingle, bring
A strong regard and awe: but speech alone
Doth vanish like a flaring thing,
An in the ear, not conscience ring.

In the poem, how does the extended metaphor of the stained-glass window develop to convey the speaker’s perspective on preaching?