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.
Zeugma and syllepsis
Scansion in practice
Sonnet forms
Romanticism in poetry
Euphony and cacophony
Villanelle
White space and the line break
Free verse
Eye rhyme
Elegy
Register and tonal shift
Extended metaphor and conceit
Short answer 1. Define or explain: End-stopped line
3 ptsShort answer 2. Define or explain: Imagism
3 ptsShort answer 3. Define or explain: Dramatic monologue
3 ptsShort answer 4. Define or explain: Imagery
3 ptsFree response
6 ptsPOETRY ANALYSIS (Question 1, 6 points). In Christopher Gilbert's poem "Marking Time" (published 1984; collected in Turning into Dwelling, Graywolf Press), the speaker observes his surroundings during a morning jog. The poem, described (read the released poem at AP Central for the full text): In 32 lines of free verse, the jogging speaker moves through a morning landscape that keeps dissolving into memory. The blue sky seems "a memory like a sheer silk fabric" held too far back to see through; the new air makes his body feel young; the smell of two pear trees flowering white again reminds him that their blossoms are as ephemeral as the words he recites to pass the time in wheezing, repetitious breath. He counts off squirrels, blue jays, and downed trees as markers of distance — brief names to crowd his mind "with anything I can count on." The poem's turn comes on a hill: struggling against the wind, he watches a small butterfly waver with spread wings and remembers dreaming of his sister, who telephoned the night before while he slept — and remembers how, twenty years earlier, she gave him a black butterfly with yellow specks from the held darkness of her brown palms. Whatever she said then is "immaterial," he insists; what endures is the gesture. In the closing lines, a bird crossing the disk of the sun fans down a flaring shadow that flickers "like a rustled page with a poem on it" — as quick, the speaker says, as the "flute darkness" of a sister's voice that a brother will hear in his heart "when he's breathing deep enough." Write a well-written essay analyzing how Gilbert uses literary elements and techniques to convey the speaker's complex reflections while jogging. You should: present a thesis with a defensible interpretation; select and use evidence; explain how the evidence supports your line of reasoning; and use appropriate grammar and punctuation.