Model Poetry Questions for English Graduate: Mixed Up Categories

Poetry Questions

Difficulty Level:  Graduation     Time: 2hr

Each Question: Word Limit: as per

1. Give short answer to any eight of the following questions. 2x8=16

a. What is the full title of Wordsworth’s Tintern Abbey?

b. Who is Maenad? What natural sight resembles a Maenad in Ode to the West Wind?

c. What is ‘embalmed darkness’ in Ode to a Nightingale?

d. What story does Geraldine tell Christabel regarding her abduction?

e. Why does Tom Dacre cry? What consolation does the speaker give him?

f. What does the sculpture of Neptune taming a seahorse suggest in My Last Duchess?

g. What boon does Tithonus ask for? How does ‘strong Hours’ work upon him?

h. What allusion does ‘ignorant armies clash by night’ make in Dover Beach?

i. Name the five handmaidens of Mary in The Blessed Damosel

j. What is ‘fretty chervil’ in Hopkins’ Thou Art..?

k. Who was Michelangelo? Why do the ladies talk about him in PrufrocK?

I. What does the hawk mean by ‘hooked head’ and ‘hooked feet’?

m. Who in Easter 1916 ‘This other man’? What ‘most bitter wrong’ did he commit?

n. Who was Lazarus, as mentioned in Prufrock?

2. Answer any three of the following questions

a. What does the Nightingale stand for in Keats’ Ode to a Nightingale? How does Keats intend to escape in the world of the Nightingale? 2+10

b. Why is the Castle of Chillon, as celebrated in Byron’s poem, famous for? Why and how does the poet celebrate the castle? 2+10

c. Who was Tithonus? How does Tennyson’s Tithonus turn mythology into the metaphor for the self and reality? 2+10

d. Consider Hopkins’ Thou Art Indeed Just, Lord as a poem depicting ‘the just man’s complaint against the universe’. Would you consider the poem as one of utter hopelessness? 10+2

e. Why is the meeting strange in Owen’s Strange Meeting? Analyze it as an anti-war poem. 2+10

3. Explain, with reference to the context, any four of the following. (4+2)x4=24

 a. And I have felt
A presence that disturbs me with the joy
 Of elevated thoughts.

b. Thou, from whose unseen presence the leaves dead
Are driven, like ghosts from an enchanter fleeing 
Yellow, and black, and pale, and hectic red.

c. ...as if she ranked
My gift of a nine-hundred-years-old name
With anybody’s gift.

d. And all is seared with trade; beared, smeared with to
I, 
And wears man’s smudge and shares man’s sine
I.

e. The yellow fog that rubs its back upon the window-panes 
The yellow smoke that rubs its muzzle on the window-panes.

f. Nothing has changed since I began. 
My eye has permitted no change. 
Iam going to keep things ilke this.

4. Answer any one of the following questions. 12

a. How does Sarojini Naidu present the lives of the Coromonal fishers in her poem against the backdrop of a romanticized sea? 12

b. Which Shakespearean line does the title of Poet, Lover, and Birdwatcher echo? Does the poem delineate? Nssim Ezekiel’s view of the poetic process? 2+10

5. Explain, with reference to the context, any one of the following. 2+4=6

a. "I followed him across the sprawling sands, 
my mind thumping in the flesh’s sling. 
Hope lay perhaps in burning the house 
 lived in."

b. "O how the winds 
 Of circumstances and freshening April showers
 Of early knowledge and unnumbered kinds
Of new perceptions shed their influence."

6. Show your acquaintance with any two of the following poetic terms. 3x2=6

a. Terza rima;

b. Dramatic monologue;

c. Elegy;

d. Mock-epic;

e. Curtail Sonnet.

Reference: Collected from Different Competitive Exams