ENGLISH 140-----Summer 2008-----INTRODUCTION TO POETRY

Prof. DAVID RICHTER

FINAL EXAMINATION

PART I

ANSWER EACH OF THE FOLLOWING QUESTIONS FULLY BUT SUCCINCTLY:

A. In what meter is each of the following passages written? Ignore the variations and present only the basic pattern against which the variations occur:

1. Woman much missed, how you call to me, call to me,

Saying that now you are not as you were

When you had changed from the one who was all to me,

But as at first, when our day was fair.

(Thomas Hardy)

2. By the shores of Gitchee Gumee

By the shining Big-Sea-Water

Stood the wigwam of Nokomis,

Daughter of the Moon, Nokomis.

Dark behind it rose the forest,

Rose the black and gloomy pine-trees,

Rose the firs with cones upon them....

(Henry Wadsworth Longfellow)

3. The curfew tolls the knell of parting day,

The lowing herd winds slowly o'er the lea,

The ploughman homeward plods his weary way,

And leaves the world to darkness and to me.

(Thomas Gray)

4. Only this oracle opens olympian, with mystical moods and triangular tenses:

Life is the lust of a lamp for the light that is dark till the dawn of the day that we die.

(Algernon Charles Swinburne)

B. Each of the following lines or brief passages contains one or more variations on their basic iambic pentameter. For THREE of these, identify the variant foot that is used and in what way the variant is expressive:

1. The long day wanes, the slow moon climbs, the deep

Moans round with many voices....

(Alfred, Lord Tennyson)

2. Come, keen iambics, with your badger's feet,

And badger-like, bite till your teeth do meet.

(John Cleveland)

3. O body swayed to music, O brightening glance,

How can we know the dancer from the dance?

(William Butler Yeats)

4. ...unsubdued

Elations when the forest blooms; gusty

Emotions on wet roads on autumn nights....

(Wallace Stevens)

C. One of the best-known poems of A.E. Housman begins as follows:

With rue my heart is laden

For golden friends I had,

For many a rose-lipt maiden,

And many a light-foot lad.

His second stanza is one of these two. Which do you think it is,

and why? (HINT: There are two clear indications, one in the

prosody and the other in the imagery.)

By brooks that murmur softly By brooks too broad for leaping

The lightfoot boys are laid; The lightfoot boys are laid;

The rose-lipt girls are sleeping The rose-lipt girls are sleeping

In many a misty glade. In fields where roses fade.

D. Discuss how sound effects are used--and to what effect--in the following poem:

John Updike: Player Piano

         My stick fingers click with a snicker

         And, chuckling, they knuckle the keys;

         Light-footed, my steel feelers flicker

         And pluck from these keys melodies.

         My paper can caper; abandon

         Is broadcast by dint of my din,

         And no man or band has a hand in

         The tones I turn on from within.

         At times I'm a jumble of rumbles,

         At others I'm light like the moon,

         But never my numb plunker fumbles,

         Misstrums me, or tries a new tune.

E. The following stanza, from Hart Crane's "To Brooklyn Bridge," describes how, from some obscure and humble lodging, a deranged man will sometimes rush to the bridge, balance a moment dizzily on the railing, then leap to his death. Show how the interplay of the rhythm with the iambic pentameter meter is effective in lines 2 and 3:

Out of some subway scuttle, cell or loft

A bedlamite speeds to thy parapets,

Tilting there momently, shrill shirt ballooning,

A jest falls from the speechless caravan.

PART II

Discuss the imagery and explain the symbolism of the paper chain in the following poem:

James Dickey: The Leap

The only thing I have of Jane MacNaughton

Is one instant of a dancing-class dance.

She was the fastest runner in the seventh grade,

My scrapbook says, even when boys were beginning

To be as big as the girls.

But I do not have her running in my mind,

Though Frances Lane is there, Agnes Fraser,

Fat Betty Lou Black in the boys-against-girls

Relays we ran at recess: she must have run

Like other girls, with her skirts tucked up

So they would be like bloomers,

But I cannot tell; that part of her is gone.

What I do have is when she came,

With the hem of her skirt where it should be

For a young lady, into the annual dance

Of the dancing class we all hated, and with a light

Grave leap, jumped up and touched the end

Of one of the paper-ring decorations

To see if she could reach it. She could,

And reached me now as well, hanging in my mind

From a brown chain of brittle paper, thin

And muscular, wide-mouthed, eager to prove

Whatever it proves when you leap

In a new dress, a new womanhood, among the boys

Whom you easily left in the dust

Of the passionless playground. If I said I saw

In the paper where Jane MacNaughton Hill,

Mother of four, leapt to her death from a window

Of a downtown hotel, and that her body crushed in

The top of a parked taxi, and that I held

Without trembling a picture of her lying cradled

In that papery steel as though lying in the grass,

One shoe idly off, arms folded across her breast,

I would not believe myself. I would say

The convenient thing, that it was a bad dream

Of maturity, to see that eternal process

Most obsessively wrong with the world

Come out of her light, earth-spurning feet

Grown heavy: would say that in the dusty heels

Of the playground some boy who did not depend

On speed of foot, caught and betrayed her.

Jane, stay where you are in my first mind:

It was odd in that school, at that dance.

I and the other slow-footed yokels sat in corners

Cutting rings out of drawing paper

Before you leapt in your new dress

And touched the end of something I began,

Above the couples struggling on the floor,

New men and women clutching at each other

And prancing foolishly as bears: hold on

To that ring I made for you, Jane--

My feet are nailed to the ground

By dust I swallowed thirty years ago--

While I examine my hands.