English Literature - Poetry and Poetic Devices: 17 MCQs with Answers

In Adrienne Rich’s poem, Aunt Jennifer embroiders tigers that prance across a screen, proud, fearless and unafraid of the men beneath the tree. Their freedom stands in deliberate contrast to their maker, whose fingers flutter through the wool and whose hand is weighed down by the massive band of her wedding ring, the emblem of a patriarchal marriage. Even when she is dead her terrified hands will still be ringed by the ordeals she was mastered by. The poem thus protests against the marginalisation of women in a male-dominated society, while art survives its maker.

Robert Frost’s nine-line poem asks whether the world will end in fire or in ice. Fire stands for desire, that is greed, lust and unbridled passion, which consume everything they touch; ice stands for hatred, indifference and coldness of heart, which are slower but, as the poet says, would suffice just as well for destruction. The poem is a compact allegory of human vices rather than a literal prophecy about the planet, and its terza rima and understated ending give the argument a chilling quiet force.

Keats packs the ode with classical allusions. Hippocrene is the fountain on Mount Helicon that sprang from the hoof of Pegasus and was sacred to the Muses, and the poet longs for a beaker full of the blushful Hippocrene, that is of poetic inspiration. A Dryad is a wood nymph, and he addresses the nightingale as a light-winged Dryad of the trees. Bacchus is the Roman god of wine, whose chariot was drawn by leopards, and the poet says he will fly not with Bacchus and his pards but on the viewless wings of Poesy. Hemlock is the poisonous plant of the opening line.

The line comes from the opening verse paragraph of Keats’s ‘Endymion’, prescribed as ‘A Thing of Beauty’. The poet says that in spite of despondence, the inhuman dearth of noble natures and the gloomy days, some shape of beauty always moves away the pall from our dark spirits, and therefore on every morrow we are wreathing a flowery band to bind us to the earth. The metaphor turns beauty into a garland of flowers that ties us happily to life. The sun, the moon, trees, daffodils, clear rills and the grandeur of the mighty dead are his examples.

The lines describe the goldfinch returning to her nest in the laburnum tree in Ted Hughes’s poem. In the phrase ‘her barred face identity mask’ the adjective ‘barred’ properly belongs to the markings on the bird’s plumage, yet it is attached to the compound ‘face identity mask’, and the epithet is thus shifted from the thing it literally describes to something adjacent. Such a shift of an adjective from its proper noun to a neighbouring one is a transferred epithet. The image also carries the suggestion that the bird’s markings work like a badge of identity.

‘Fear No More the Heat o’ the Sun’ is a dirge from Shakespeare’s late romance ‘Cymbeline’, sung by Guiderius and Arviragus over the body of the disguised Imogen, whom they believe dead and know as Fidele. The song consoles by listing the troubles from which death sets us free: the heat of the sun and the furious winter’s rages, the frown of the great, the tyrant’s stroke, slander, censure and the fear of calumny. Its refrain, that golden lads and girls all must as chimney-sweepers come to dust, is among the most quoted lines in Shakespeare.

The Lucy poems are a group of five short lyrics that William Wordsworth wrote mainly in Germany in 1798 and 1799 about an idealised English girl named Lucy who dies young. They are ‘Strange fits of passion have I known’, ‘She dwelt among the untrodden ways’, ‘I travelled among unknown men’, ‘Three years she grew in sun and shower’ and ‘A slumber did my spirit seal’. ‘The Solitary Reaper’, written in 1805 after a tour of the Scottish Highlands, describes a Highland girl singing as she cuts the grain and belongs to a different group altogether.