Midterm Exam

English 222

Summer I, 1998

Directions: Please answer three of the following in essay form. You may consult your books if need be. Please answer all questions in as complete a form as possible. You should provide support for your claims by citing evidence from the poem or story, but more important than that is your developing your claims beyond the obvious. Please do not spend more than 2 hours on this exam. When you have completed it, you may send it to me as an attachment to email (dbivona@asu.edu) or you may drop off a hard copy of your responses at my mailbox in the English Department office (5th floor Language and Literature). In either case, you should hand your answers in no later than 5PM on Wednesday, 6/17.

1) Wordsworth's "Ode: Intimations of Immortality" is very much a poem about the loss of something valuable, yet its tone, while elegaic, is also hopeful -- if not out and out optimistic -- in certain respects. Identify what has been lost to the grown man that the young boy once had and then discuss what consolations the poem offers the adult. You may also want to consider whether or not the poem gives a special place to the adult poet at the end.

2) Keats' "Ode on a Grecian Urn" is clearly preoccupied with the problem of time. Discuss how the poem treats time as a problem for humans. Is the poem simply lamenting the fact that all that lives must die, or is the poet finding some sort of consolation even in that fact? Would you say that the final words of wisdom that the poem offers ("Beauty is truth; truth beauty...") are meant to assert a truth which is somehow immune to the ravages of time?

3) Coleridge's "Rime of the Ancient Mariner" seems to be preoccupied with the ways in which the human mind imposes order on experience. As we discussed, it does so, at least in one case, by raising questions about whether cause-and-effect relationships are located in experience or solely in the mind. One of the chief modes of understanding which the poem features is the religious. Do you think Coleridge is suggesting in this poem that, like the modality of cause-and-effect, religious understanding is simply a way in which the human mind orders reality? If so, is the Ancient Mariner's quest for forgiveness simply a sign that he is deluded and unable to recognize that the world is not governed by any moral order but only seems to be?

4) How does Tennyson attempt, in sections 54 to 56 of "In Memoriam," to square God's divine plan with the reality that Nature has extinguished so many individuals and species over the long course of time? Do you see any passages in the poem where he reaches some sort of satisfactory accommodation between his inherited belief in a loving god and the evidence that god is reckless in his treatment of his creatures?

5) "Goblin Market" seems to depict a girl "falling" (Laura, who buys fruit from the goblin men) and a girl who redeems her (Lizzie, who goes to the goblin men to procure the redemptive juices which Laura sucks off her face). Yet, oddly enough, the redemptive act seems awfully similar in form to the "sin" which it cures. How do you account for this symmetry? Does Rossetti somehow seem to be suggesting that the difference between sin and redemptive act is unimportant? Discuss.

6) Does the adult narrator of Pater's "Child in the House" suggest that Florian's return to the house of memory leaves him feeling better than before his "return"? Do you see any significant parallels between this story and Wordsworth's Immortality Ode? If so, do you think that Pater is expanding the meaning of the Wordsworthian project or is he rather taking it in a direction that possibly might have disturbed Wordsworth himself?

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