Take this Quiz: A-Level English Literature: Poetry | Zestly

Question 1

William Blake's 'London' opens: 'I wander thro' each charter'd street, / Near where the charter'd Thames does flow'. What does the repetition of 'charter'd' do here?

Accepted Answer

It carries a word belonging to property and trade across from the man-made street to the river, so that even the Thames is shown as something owned.

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It is an anaphora, since the word opens both of the lines.

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It is a caesura, breaking each line at its midpoint.

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It is a controlling metaphor, comparing the whole city to a legal document.

Question 2

In John Keats's 'Ode to a Nightingale', the lines: 'My heart aches, and a drowsy numbness pains / My sense, as though of hemlock I had drunk', contain a specific rhythmic feature. How does the metre function here?

Accepted Answer

The steady iambic pentameter establishes a sense of heavy, lethargic movement.

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The trochaic substitution in the first foot creates a sense of sudden, violent awakening.

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The use of anapaestic feet speeds up the line to reflect the speaker's frantic state.

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The spondaic ending suggests a final, decisive resolution to the speaker's pain.

Question 3

Wordsworth's 'Composed upon Westminster Bridge' has the lines: 'This City now doth, like a garment, wear / The beauty of the morning; silent, bare'. What is the phrase 'like a garment' doing?

Accepted Answer

It begins the personification of the city: dressed in the morning, the city is treated from here on as a body that can wear, and sleep, and breathe.

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It is a caesura, isolating the word 'beauty' from what follows it.

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It is an example of alliteration, binding 'beauty' to 'bare'.

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It marks the volta, turning the sonnet from description to argument.

Question 4

Wilfred Owen's 'Anthem for Doomed Youth' contains the lines: 'Only the stuttering rifles' rapid rattle / Can patter out their hasty orisons.' What is the SOUND of these lines doing?

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Sibilance softens the description, so that the deaths seem peaceful.

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Assonance on long vowels slows the lines to the pace of a funeral procession.

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The clipped t and r sounds imitate rifle fire, so that the guns are performing the prayers the dead are denied.

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The lines run in trochaic tetrameter, a metre associated with nursery rhyme.

Question 5

Shelley's 'Ozymandias' contains the lines: 'Half sunk, a shatter'd visage lies, whose frown, / And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command'. What is the effect of the pause after 'lies'?

Answer

The break interrupts the line in the middle, just as the statue itself is broken, and holds the ruined face still for a moment before the list of its features begins.

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It is an example of enjambment, since the sentence continues past the line-break.

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It marks the volta, where the sonnet turns from the traveller's account to the poet's own judgement.

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It is a spondee, two stressed syllables that slow the line to a halt.