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This test consists of 5 short answer questions, 10 short essay questions, and 1 (of 3) essay topics.
Short Answer Questions
1. What “hangs in the balance before its due time" (ll. 68-69)?
2. Which of the following will "urge the eager-hearted / spirit to travel" (ll. 48-52)?
3. In l. 92, “the graybeard grieves; he knows his old friends,” how many relatively stressed / emphasized syllables are present?
4. In line 44, “He has no thought of the harp or the taking of rings,” there is an example of which of the following?
5. In the phrase “he always has longing who hastens to sea” (l. 47), how many relatively stressed / emphasized syllables are present?
Short Essay Questions
1. What tone is present in the following passage, and how is it conveyed? “The days are lost, / and all the pomp of this earthly kingdom; / there are now neither kings nor emperors / nor gold-givers as there once were, / when they did the greatest glorious deeds / and lived in most lordly fame” (ll. 80-85)?
2. Consider the comment that “the lone flier cries out, / incites my heart irresistibly to the whale’s path / over the open sea” (ll. 62-64). What is the lone flier? How do you know?
3. Consider the narrator’s statement that “And so now my thought flies out from my breast, / my spirit moves with the sea-flood. / roams widely over the whale’s home, / to the corners of the earth, and comes back to me / greedy and hungry” (ll. 58-62). What tone is conveyed by the passage, and how is it conveyed?
4. Consider ll. 58-102 as a unit. What is the overall tone of the passage, and how is it conveyed?
5. Consider the narrator’s comments that “When life fails [a man], his fleshly cloak will neither / taste the sweet nor touch the sore, / nor move a hand nor think with his mind” (ll. 94-96). What is the “fleshly cloak,” and what wears it? How do you know?
6. The narrator comments that “He has no thought of the harp or the taking of rings, / nor the pleasures of woman or joy in the world, / nor anything else but the tumbling waves— / he always has longing who hastens to sea” (ll. 44-47). What rhetorical appeal/s does the narrator make in the comment?
7. What is the strongest pattern of alliteration in line line 42, "that he never has sorrow over his seafaring," and why?
8. The narrator comments that “He has no thought of the harp or the taking of rings, / nor the pleasures of woman or joy in the world, / nor anything else but the tumbling waves— / he always has longing who hastens to sea” (ll. 44-47). What tone is conveyed in the comment, and how?
9. The narrator asserts that “And so no man on earth is so proud in spirit, / nor so gifted in grace or so keen in youth, / nor so bold in deeds, nor so beloved of his lord, / that he never has sorrow over his seafaring, / when he sees what the Lord might have in store for him” (ll. 39-43). What rhetorical appeal/s does the narrator make in the assertion?The narrator asserts that “And so no man on earth is so proud in spirit, / nor so gifted in grace or so keen in youth, / nor so bold in deeds, nor so beloved of his lord, / that he never has sorrow over his seafaring, / when he sees what the Lord might have in store for him” (ll. 39-43). What rhetorical appeal/s does the narrator make in the assertion?
10. The narrator asserts that “And so no man on earth is so proud in spirit, / nor so gifted in grace or so keen in youth, / nor so bold in deeds, nor so beloved of his lord, / that he never has sorrow over his seafaring, / when he sees what the Lord might have in store for him” (ll. 39-43). What tone is conveyed in the assertion, and how?
Essay Topics
Write an essay for ONE of the following topics:
Essay Topic 1
Consider the overall poem, its contexts, and its PRESUMED PRIMARY AUDIENCE (that is, the people at Exeter Cathedral who would have read or heard the text in the Middle Ages). What is the central message of the poem? What in the text and context suggests it is so? Given its presumed primary audience, is it likely to be convincing in putting across that central message? Why or why not?
Essay Topic 2
The narrator makes much of the disjunction between life aboard ship and life in the town. What effect does the narrator’s focus on the difference between settled and seagoing life have on the reader? How does it do so?
Essay Topic 3
Liuzza remarks that there is a shift in the poem so drastic that it has been taken in the past to indicate two narrators at work in the poem (19n5). While Liuzza adds that scholarship generally rejects the idea, there is still a pronounced shift in tone in the poem. Where is it, and what in the text places it at that point, rather than at another point?
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This section contains 1,296 words (approx. 5 pages at 300 words per page) |
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