Unit 2: Poetry I
English Lit · Unit 2 · Paper 1

Poetry I unit test

A test on this unit alone, marked as a percentage and a letter grade — for the test your class is actually sitting, rather than for May. Answer everything, then submit once: seeing the answer to question 3 before attempting question 4 makes the final percentage meaningless.

Paper 1Paper 2Paper 3
Each paper is built from this unit’s 56 terms and is the same for everyone, so a teacher can assign “Unit 2, Paper 1” and every student sits the identical test. Multiple choice is marked objectively; the written sections you mark yourself against the model answer and rubric.
Suggested time 33 min 30 points0/17 attempted
1

Rhyme scheme

2

Romanticism in poetry

3

Scansion in practice

4

Chiasmus

5

Synecdoche vs metonymy

6

Pathetic fallacy

7

Sprung rhythm

8

Metaphysical conceit

9

Tone shift in poetry

10

Terza rima

11

Lyric, narrative and dramatic poetry

12

Ambiguity

Short answer 1. Define or explain: Sibilance

3 pts

Short answer 2. Define or explain: Internal rhyme

3 pts

Short answer 3. Define or explain: Elegy

3 pts

Short answer 4. Define or explain: Sonnet forms

3 pts

Free response

6 pts

POETRY ANALYSIS (Question 1, 6 points). In Colleen McElroy's poem "Monologue for Saint Louis" (published 1980; collected in Queen of the Ebony Isles, Wesleyan University Press), the speaker returns to her childhood home in St. Louis, Missouri, after an extended absence and contemplates how she has changed. The poem, described (read the released poem at AP Central for the full text): The 37-line free-verse monologue opens with the speaker "home again" but with her heart "barely there," choked by words the way she and her childhood companions were once stained by the blue-black grapes they stole from a neighbor's arbor each summer. The grape arbor becomes the poem's central image and measure of time: once thick with latticed clusters, it is now a crumbling heap of rotting sticks trellised by earthworms, unable to shield anyone "from wind or words." The speaker vows penance for her many disappearances, but the home she returns to has itself disappeared — familiar houses and schoolyards gone, childhood streets blocked by one-way signs arrayed "like a lacework of warnings or accusing fingers." Her cousins, in "cloaks of black skin," drag her through the twisted vines of family history and remind her of each summer's broken vow to return for good. The old neighborhood has been cleared for the stainless-steel Gateway Arch and its tidy parks — a "strange summer resort" into which her cousins vanish like shadows — leaving the speaker to end where she began: home, yet "a stranger in love with words," her grape clusters now clusters of poems. Write a well-written essay analyzing how McElroy uses literary elements and techniques to convey the speaker's complex experience of returning home. You should: present a thesis with a defensible interpretation; select and use evidence to support your line of reasoning; explain how the evidence supports it; and use appropriate grammar and punctuation.