AP Poetry

2005B Poem: “Five A.M.” (William Stafford) / “Five Flights Up” (Elizabeth Bishop)
Prompt: Carefully read the two poems below. Then in a well-organized essay compare the speakers’ reflections on their early morning surroundings and analyze the techniques the poets use to communicate the speakers’ different states of mind.

Still dark, the early morning breathes
A soft sound above the fire. Hooded
Lights on porches lead past lawns,
A hedge; I pass the house of the couple
Who have the baby, the yard with the little
Dog; my feet pad and grit on the pavement, flicker
Past streetlights; my arms alternate
Easily to my pace. Where are my troubles?

There are people in every country who never
Turn into killers, saints have built
Sanctuaries on islands and in valleys,
Conquerors have quit and gone home, for thousands
Of years farmers have worked their fields.
My feet begin the uphill curve
Where a thicket spills with birds every spring.
The air doesn’t stir. Rain touches my face.

Still dark.
The unknown bird sits on his usual branch.
The little dog next door barks in his sleep
inquiringly, just once.
Perhaps in his sleep, too, the bird inquires
once or twice, quavering.
Questions---if that is what they are---
answered directly, simply,
by day itself.

Enormous morning, ponderous, meticulous;
gray light streaking each bare branch,
each single twig, along one side,
making another tree, of glassy veins...
The bird still sits there. Now he seems to yawn.

The little black dog runs in his yard.
His owner’s voice arises, stern,
“You ought to be ashamed!”
What has he done?
He bounces cheerfully up and down;
he rushes in circles in the fallen leaves.

Obviously, he has no sense of shame.
He and the bird know everything is answered,
all taken care of,
no need to ask again.
---Yesterday brought to today so lightly!
(A yesterday I find almost impossible to lift.)

2006 Poem: “Evening Hawk” (Robert Penn Warren)
Prompt: Read the following poem carefully. Then write a well-organized essay in which you analyze how the poet uses language to describe the scene and to convey mood and meaning.

From plane of light to plane, wings dipping through
Geometries and orchids that the sunset builds,
Out of the peak’s black angularity of shadow, riding
The last tumultuous avalanche of
Light above pines and the guttural gorge,
The hawk comes.
His wing
Scythes down another day, his motion
Is that of the honed steel-edge, we hear
The crashless fall of stalks of Time.

Look! Look! he is climbing the last light
Who knows neither Time nor error, and under
Whose eye, unforgiving, the world, unforgiven, swings
Into shadow.

Long now,
The last thrush is still, the last bat
Now cruises in his sharp hieroglyphics. His wisdom
Is ancient, too, and immense. The star
Is steady, like Plato, over the mountain.

If there were no wind we might, we think, hear
The earth grind on its axis, or history
Drip in darkness like a leaking pipe in the cellar.

2006B Poem: “To Paint a Water Lily” (Ted Hughes)
Prompt: Read the following poem carefully. Then write an essay discussing how the poet uses literary techniques to reveal the speaker’s attitudes toward nature and the artist’s task.

2007 Poems: “A Barred Owl” (Richard Wilbur) and “The History Teacher” (Billy Collins)
Prompt: In the following two poems, adults provide explanations for children. Read the
poems carefully. Then write an essay in which you compare and contrast the two poems,
analyzing how each poet uses literary devices to make his point.

The warping night-air having brought the boom
Of an owl’s voice into her darkened room,
We tell the wakened child that all she heard
Was an odd question from a forest bird,
Asking of us, if rightly listened to,
“Who cooks for you?” and then “Who cooks for you?”

Words, which can make our terrors bravely clear,
Can also thus domesticate a fear,
And send a small child back to sleep at night
Not listening for the sound of stealthy flight
Or dreaming of some small thing in a claw
Borne up to some dark branch and eaten raw.

Trying to protect his students’ innocence
he told them the Ice Age was really just
the Chilly Age, a period of a million years
when everyone had to wear sweaters.

And the Stone Age became the Gravel Age,
named after the long driveways of the time.

The Spanish Inquisition was nothing more
than an outbreak of questions such as
“How far is it from here to Madrid?”
“What do you call the matador’s hat?”

The War of the Roses took place in a garden,
and the Enola Gay dropped one tiny atom on Japan.

The children would leave his classroom
for the playground to torment the weak
and the smart,
mussing up their hair and breaking their glasses,

while he gathered up his notes and walked home
past flower beds and white picket fences,
wondering if they would believe that soldiers
in the Boer War told long, rambling stories
designed to make the enemy nod off.

2007B Poem: “Here” (Philip Larkin)
Prompt: Read the following poem carefully. Then, write a well-organized essay in which
you analyze the techniques the poet uses to convey his attitude toward the places he describes.

Swerving east, from rich industrial shadows
And traffic all night north; swerving through fields
Too thin and thistled to be called meadows,
And now and then a harsh-named halt, that shields
5 Workmen at dawn; swerving to solitude
Of skies and scarecrows, haystacks, hares and pheasants,
And the widening river’s slow presence,
The piled gold clouds, the shining gull-marked mud.

Gathers to the surprise of town:
10 Here domes and statues, spires and cranes cluster
Beside grain-scattered streets, barge-crowded water,
And residents from raw estates, brought down
The dead straight miles by stealing flat-faced trolleys,
Push through plate-glass swing doors to their desires –
15 Cheap suits, red kitchen-ware, sharp shoes, iced lollies,
Electric mixers, toasters, washers, driers –

A cut-price crowd, urban yet simple, dwelling
Where only salesmen and relations come
Within a terminate and relations come
20 Pastoral of ships up streets, the slave museum,
Tatoo-shops, consulates, grim head-scarfed wives;
And out beyond its mortgaged half-built edges
Fast-shadowed wheat-fields, running high as hedges,
Isolate villages, where removed lives

25 Loneliness clarifies. Here silence stands
Like heat. Here leaves unnoticed thicken,
Hidden weeds flower, neglected waters quicken,
Luminously-peopled air ascends;
And past the poppies bluish neutral distance
30 Ends the land suddenly beyond a beach
Of shapes and shingle. Here is unfenced existence:
Facing the sun, untalkative, out of reach.

2008 Poems: “When I Have Fears” (John Keats) and “Mezzo Cammin” (Henry W. Longfellow)
Prompt: In the two poems below, Keats and Longfellow reflect on similar concerns. Read the poems carefully. Then write and essay in which you compare and contrast the two poems, analyzing the poetic techniques each writer uses to explore his particular situation.

When I Have Fears

            When I have fears that I may cease to be
               Before my pen has glean’d my teeming brain,
            Before high-piled books, in charactery,
               Hold like rich garners the full ripen’d grain;
5          When I behold, upon the night’s starr’d face,
               Huge cloudy symbols of a high romance,
            And think that I may never live to trace
               Their shadows, with the magic hand of chance;
            And when I feel, fair creature of an hour,
10           That I shall never look upon thee more,
            Never have relish in the faery power
               Of unreflecting love; - then on the shore
            Of the wide world I stand alone, and think
            Till love and fame to nothingness do sink.

Written at Boppard on the Rhine August 25, 1842,
Just Before Leaving Home

            Half my life is gone, and I have let
               The years slip from me and have not fulfilled
               The aspiration of my youth, to build
               Some tower of song with lofty parapet.
5          Not indolence, nor pleasure, nor the fret
               Of restless passions that would not be stilled,
               But sorrow, and a care that almost killed,
               Kept me from what I may accomplish yet;
            Though, half-way up the hill, I see the Past
19           Lying beneath me with its sounds and sights,--
               A city in the twilight dim and vast,
            With smoking roofs, soft bells, and gleaming lights,--
               And hear above me on the autumnal blast
            The cataract2 of Death far thundering from the heights.

1 The title is from the first line of Dante’s Divine Comedy: “Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita” (“Midway upon the journey of our life”).
2 A large waterfall
2008B Poems: “Hawk Roosting” (Ted Hughes) and “Golden Retrievals” (Mark Doty)
Prompt: The following two poems present animal-eye views of the world. Read each poem carefully. Then write an essay in which you analyze the techniques used in the poems to characterize he speakers and convey differing views of the world.

HAWK ROOSTING

     I sit in the top of the wood, my eyes closed.
     Inaction, no falsifying dream
     Between my hooked head and hooked feet:
     Or in sleep rehearse perfect kills and eat.

5    The convenience of the high trees!
     The air’s buoyancy and the sun’s ray
     Are of advantage to me;
     And the earth’s face upward for my inspection.

     My feet are locked upon the rough bark.
10 It took the whole of Creation
     To produce my foot, my each feather:
     Now I hold Creation in my foot

     Or fly up, and revolve it all slowly -
     I kill where I please because it is all mine.
15 There is no sophistry in my body:
     My manners are tearing off heads -

     The allotment of death.
     For the one path of my flight is direct
     Through the bones of the living.
20 No arguments assert my right:

     The sun is behind me.
     Nothing has changed since I began.
     My eye has permitted no change.
     I am going to keep things like this.

-- Ted Hughes

GOLDEN RETRIEVALS

     Fetch? Balls and sticks capture my attention
     seconds at a time. Catch? I don’t think so.
     Bunny, tumbling leaf, a squirrel who’s—oh
     joy—actually scared. Sniff the wind, then

5   I’m off again: muck, pond, ditch, residue
     of any thrillingly dead thing. And you?
     Either you’re sunk in the past, half our walk,
     thinking of what you never can bring back,

     or else you’re off in some fog concerning
10 —tomorrow, is that what you call it? My work:
     to unsnare time’s warp (and woof!), retrieving,
     my haze-headed friend, you. This shining bark,

a Zen master’s bronzy gong, calls you here,
entirely, now: bow-wow, bow-wow, bow-wow.

-- Mark Doty

2009 Speech from Henry VIII (William Shakespeare)
Prompt: In the following speech from Shakespeare’s play Henry VIII,Cardinal Wolsey considers his sudden downfall from his position as advisor to the king. Spokesmen for the king have just left Wolsey alone on stage. Read the speech carefully. Then write a well-organized essay in which you analyze how Shakespeare uses elements such as allusion, figurative language, and tone to convey Wolsey’s complex response to his dismissal from court.

           So farewell—to the little good you bear me.
           Farewell? a long farewell to all my greatness!
           This is the state of man: to-day he puts forth
           The tender leaves of hopes, to-morrow blossoms,
5         And bears his blushing honors thick upon him;
           The third day comes a frost, a killing frost,
           And when he thinks, good easy man, full surely
           His greatness is a-ripening, nips his root,
           And then he falls as I do. I have ventur’d,
10      Like little wanton boys that swim on bladders,1
           This many summers in a sea of glory,
           But far beyond my depth. My high-blown pride
           At length broke under me, and now has left me,
           Weary and old with service, to the mercy
15      Of a rude stream that must for ever hide me.
           Vain pomp and glory of this world, I hate ye!
           I feel my heart new open’d. O how wretched
           Is that poor man that hangs on princes’ favors!
           There is, betwixt that smile we would aspire to,
20      That sweet aspect of princes, and their ruin,
           More pangs and fears than wars or women have;
           And when he falls, he falls like Lucifer,2
           Never to hope again.

2009B Poem: “Icarus” (Edward Field)
Prompt: The following poem, written by Edward Field, makes use of the Greek myth of Daedalus and Icarus.* Read the poem carefully. Then write an essay in which you analyze how Field employs literary devices in adapting the Icarus myth to a contemporary setting.

      Only the feathers floating around the hat
      Showed that anything more spectacular had occurred
      Than the usual drowning. The police preferred to ignore
      The confusing aspects of the case,
5      And the witnesses ran off to a gang war.
      So the report filed and forgotten in the archives read simply
      “Drowned,” but it was wrong: Icarus
      Had swum away, coming at last to the city
      Where he rented a house and tended the garden.
10    “That nice Mr. Hicks” the neighbors called him,
      Never dreaming that the gray, respectable suit
      Concealed arms that had controlled huge wings
      Nor that those sad, defeated eyes had once
      Compelled the sun. And had he told them
15    They would have answered with a shocked, uncomprehending stare.
      No, he could not disturb their neat front yards;
      Yet all his books insisted that this was a horrible mistake:
      What was he doing aging in a suburb?
      Can the genius of the hero fall
20    To the middling stature of the merely talented?
      And nightly Icarus probes his wound
      And daily in his workshop, curtains carefully drawn,
      Constructs small wings and tries to fly
      To the lighting fixture on the ceiling:
25    Fails every time and hates himself for trying.
      He had thought himself a hero, had acted heroically,
      And dreamt of his fall, the tragic fall of the hero;
      But now rides commuter trains,
      Serves on various committees,
        30    And wishes he had drowned.

*Daedalus and his son, Icarus, fashioned wings of feathers and wax in an attempt to escape from prison by flying across the sea. Before their flight, Daedalus warned his son not to fly too close to the sun. But, caught up in the experience of flying, Icarus ignored the warning and soared upward. The heat of the sun melted the wax, the wings fell off, and he plunged to his death in the sea