How I would have answered the MIDTERM EXAM ENGLISH 127 

Please identify ten of the following passages (all if you want extra credit). Half credit will be given if you give author and poem. The other half depends on how you describe what may of interest in the passage—matters of style or theme or the development of patterns of imagery. (80 points)

1. How but in custom and in ceremony

Are innocence and beauty born?

Ceremony is a name for the rich horn

And Custom for the spreading laurel.

A ten point answer here would mention author and poem—“Prayer for my Daughter” last stanza. The in would mention the chiasmus and discuss why the chiasmus matters here. Chiasmus is an example of something ceremonious and customary generating a kind of excess meaning—as if there were a rich horn of plenty. Also mention of how innocence and beauty can be born in ceremony and custom—ceremony is one way to block out irony and other imperfections to establish a kind of innocence.

 

2. the sea is circled and sways

peacefully upon its plantlike stem.

I was interested here in how Williams creates a Cezanne like effect by altering normal perception. WE see against custom and habit, but something there to be seen in how the land can effect what we see as the sea.

 

 

3. Accomplished fingers begin to play;

Their eyes mid many wrinkles

Their ancient glittering eyes, are gay.

I was in interested in how Yeat’s Lapis Lazuli moves from actors to just the audience’s eyes as having a similar gaiety. Why is this possible?

 

 

4. The milk-white girls

Unbend from the holly-trees

And their snow-white leopard

Watches to follow our trace.

I wanted the class to take a shot at defining vorticism in poetry as manifest relation of forces in tension that also involve abstract relations taken very concretely. There is a whole story of sexual need in this figure of the trace.

 

5. Till the Spinner of the Years

Said “Now!” And each one hears,

And consummation comes, and jars two hemispheres.

I wanted awareness of Hardy’s sense of irony and forces beyond the human, played with in sexual terms/

6. … I strove

To love you in the old high way of love;

That it had all seemed happy, and yet we’d grown

As weary hearted as that hollow moon.

I wanted the sense of yeat’s changing styles in “Adam’s curse” and recognizing the pressure of ordinary experience. Also the sound play is gorgeous.

7. We make out of the quarrel with others rhetoric, but of the quarrel with ourselves poetry. Unlike the rhetoricians, who get a confident voice from remembering the crowd they have won or may win, we sing amid our uncertainty … and solitude.

I was interested in whether Students would pick up on the hatred of rhetoric and perhaps explain it a little.

8. A sort of horror, a sort of protest against his withdrawing into that horrid black hole.

I wanted people to appreciate how Lawrence is very wordy, but also quite powerful. Also the speaker’s efforts to judge the snake in civilized terms are evident in “horrid.”

 

The other three passages should be obvious.

9. It will flame out, like shining from shook foil;

It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil

Crushed. Why do men then now not reck his rod.

10. Heavy vine on the oarshafts,

And, out of nothing, a breathing,

hot breath on my ankles,

11. I count those feathered balls of soot

The moor hen guides upon the stream,

To silence the envy in my thought.

 

II. Write a twenty minute essay on a question of your own choosing that pertains to the content of this course. (20 points)