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Elementary My Dear Assignment

The poem describes the persona's family history of farming and "digging" through generations. While the persona initially sees his ancestors' work as demeaning, by the end of the poem he has a new perspective. He sees his pen as a tool to celebrate and record his family's agricultural past, reconciling his modern life as a poet with his roots. The play on the word "digging" to refer both to farming and writing is an example of a metaphor, representing the persona's changed view of his family history.

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205 views5 pages

Elementary My Dear Assignment

The poem describes the persona's family history of farming and "digging" through generations. While the persona initially sees his ancestors' work as demeaning, by the end of the poem he has a new perspective. He sees his pen as a tool to celebrate and record his family's agricultural past, reconciling his modern life as a poet with his roots. The play on the word "digging" to refer both to farming and writing is an example of a metaphor, representing the persona's changed view of his family history.

Uploaded by

api-3781392
Copyright
© Attribution Non-Commercial (BY-NC)
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
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Download as DOC, PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
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Elementary, My Dear!

Instructions: Please note that this is part of your CA Mark for Term 4.
Please check your spelling before submitting your answers as no
marks will be awarded for incorrect spelling. You are to refer to the
printable copy of ‘Let’s revise your literary devices!’ as a guide. (2 marks per
answer; Maximum: 16 marks)

1. Read the following poem by William Blake that describes the terrible
conditions of London life in the 19th century. State the form of the poem and
its rhyme scheme. The poem, London is written in _______ and has a/an
____________ rhyme scheme.

I wander thro' each charter'd street,


Near where the charter'd Thames does flow,
And mark in every face I meet
Marks of weakness, marks of woe.

In every cry of every Man,


In every Infant's cry of fear,
In every voice, in every ban,
The mind-forg'd manacles I hear.

How the Chimney-sweeper's cry


Every black'ning Church appalls;
And the hapless Soldier's sigh
Runs in blood down Palace walls.

But most thro' midnight streets I hear


How the youthful Harlot's curse
Blasts the new born Infant's tear,
And blights with plagues the Marriage hearse.

(Note 4 marks for Q1)

2. In what is arguably Shakespeare’s most famous sonnet (Sonnet 18), the


persona or voice of the poem describes his lover’s beauty as immortal and
greater than what nature can offer. By examining line 11, state the literary
device used.
_______________________________
Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?
Thou art more lovely and more temperate.
Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,
And summer's lease hath all too short a date.
Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines,
And often is his gold complexion dimmed;
And every fair from fair sometime declines,
By chance, or nature's changing course untrimmed.
But thy eternal summer shall not fade
Nor lose possession of that fair thou ow'st;
Nor shall death brag thou wand'rest in his shade,
When in eternal lines to time thou grow'st,
So long as men can breathe or eyes can see,
So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.

3. In the extract of T. S. Eliot’s The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, identify the
literary device in lines 2-3. ______________________

Let us go then, you and I,


When the evening is spread out against the sky
Like a patient etherised upon a table;
Let us go, through certain half-deserted streets,
The muttering retreats
Of restless nights in one-night cheap hotels
And sawdust restaurants with oyster-shells:
Streets that follow like a tedious argument
Of insidious intent
To lead you to an overwhelming question…
Oh, do not ask, “What is it?”
Let us go and make our visit.

In the room the women come and go


Talking of Michelangelo.

4. In Percy B. Shelley’s poem Ozymandias (1818), the persona speaks of


meeting a traveller who reports having seen an immense shattered statue
lying in the desert. The statue is that of Ozymandias, the Greeks’ name for a
thirteenth-century BC King, Ramses II of Egypt. Identify the literary device
used in line 5, which effectively describes the expression of the statue by
means of a repetition of sounds. ________________________

I met a traveller from an antique land


Who said: "Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert . . . Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed:
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."

5. In Catherine Fisher’s poem Words, the persona’s tone is cautionary as words


are implicitly compared to stones, horses, apples, flimsy coracles (i.e. weak
and easily broken boats) and candles. The persona maintains the need to pay
attention to how we use words as they have the power to give hope and
destroy. State the literary device used to make this indirect comparison.
____________________
They are stones
shaped to the hand.
Fling them accurately.

They are horses.


Bridle them;
they’ll run away with you.

They are windows,


opening on vistas
that are unreachable.

They are apples.


Bite on hardness
to the sweet core.

They are coracles;


flimsy,
soon overloaded.

They are candles.


Carry them carefully.
They have burned cities.

6. Maya Angelou’s Touched By An Angel examines the subject of coming to


terms with life’s triumphs and challenges. The persona encourages the reader
to celebrate love and its possibilities instead of living in isolation and hanging
on to past hurts and mistakes. Thus, the poem’s ________ is optimistic and
celebratory.

We, unaccustomed to courage


exiles from delight
live coiled in shells of loneliness
until love leaves its high holy temple
and comes into our sight
to liberate us into life.

Love arrives
and in its train come ecstasies
old memories of pleasure
ancient histories of pain.
Yet if we are bold,
love strikes away the chains of fear
from our souls.

We are weaned from our timidity


In the flush of love's light
we dare be brave
And suddenly we see
that love costs all we are
and will ever be.
Yet it is only love
which sets us free.

7. Seamus Heaney’s poem Digging explores how to reconcile (i.e. to make two
conflicting ideas/things compatible) one’s agricultural past with today’s
modern life. At the start of the poem, the persona - a poet - specifies his
intention to attack and dismiss his ancestors’ life as he considers their farming
roots demeaning. By the end of the poem however, he changes his mind. He
now sees his ‘pen’ as a tool to celebrate and record his family history. Hence,
the play on the word digging is an example of a _______. This device is in
turn symbolic of the change in the persona’s perception of his family.

Between my finger and my thumb


The squat pen rests; as snug as a gun.

Under my window a clean rasping sound


When the spade sinks into gravelly ground:
My father, digging. I look down

Till his straining rump among the flowerbeds


Bends low, comes up twenty years away
Stooping in rhythm through potato drills
Where he was digging.

The coarse boot nestled on the lug, the shaft


Against the inside knee was levered firmly.
He rooted out tall tops, buried the bright edge deep
To scatter new potatoes that we picked
Loving their cool hardness in our hands.

By God, the old man could handle a spade,


Just like his old man.

My grandfather could cut more turf in a day


Than any other man on Toner's bog.
Once I carried him milk in a bottle
Corked sloppily with paper. He straightened up
To drink it, then fell to right away
Nicking and slicing neatly, heaving sods
Over his shoulder, digging down and down
For the good turf. Digging.

The cold smell of potato mold, the squelch and slap


Of soggy peat, the curt cuts of an edge
Through living roots awaken in my head.
But I've no spade to follow men like them.

Between my finger and my thumb


The squat pen rests.
I'll dig with it.
THE END.

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