Dr. Morillo, English 207Q Midterm: Knowledge of Prosody
& Form
·
Answer
each question. All may receive full or partial credit. 25 @ 4 pts. each.
1. Which of these are 2-syllable poetic feet?: a)
trochee b) anapest c) pyrrhic
2. Scan these two lines from Frost by marking the accented and unaccented syllables:
The rumbling sound ux ux
Of load on load of apples coming in. ux ux ux ux ux
3. Lennard’s definition of
free verse is: “poetry in which the meter varies.” Explain briefly what is inadequate about Lennard’s definition. Only
attends to meter and doesn’t explain that meter typically varies in formal
verse, too; no attention to lineation, rhyme, borders with prose
4. Name the 4 punctuation “stops.” Which is the lightest stop? Period,
colon, semi-colon, comma; comma
5. Mark the rhyme scheme in this stanza, using the standard way to mark rhymes:
He took his vorpal
sword in hand: a
Long time the manxome foe he sought— b
So rested he by the Tumtum tree, c
And stood awhile
in thought. b
6. What are two formal features of the sestina that
distinguish it from the villanelle? Sestina
is 39 lines, ends in tercet called ‘envoi’, uses autorhyme; viallanell is 15 lines,
uses double refrain
7. Which of the lines below has rising rhythm?:
a) From his footprints flowed a river, / Leaped into the light of morning,
b) The world is too much with us; late and
soon because it is iambic
8. According to the rules of meter, which is the “distinguishing foot” in this line? Put a bracket around just the distinguishing foot:
Batter my heart, three-personed God; for you
9. What do we call the last two lines in a
Shakespearean sonnet? couplet
10. What is authorhyme?
What does the requirement to use autorhyme in the
sestina help make them hard to write? Word
rhymes with itself. “This is hard to do when writing a sestina, because it is
harder to figure out how to use the same word multiple times at the end of
lines” the more that you are forced to
repeat (use old information) the harder it is to add in significant new
information, especially in limited lines. That’s why Bishops choice of an even
shorter line for her sestina indicates an even higher level of challenge she
set herself: her repeated words return even more quickly in a 4-beat,
tetrameter line
11. How many feet in any octameter
line? eight
12. Name this poetic form used by Shelley in Ode
to the West Wind: linked tercets rhyming aba bcb cdc etc. terza rima
13. Lennard claims that line 34 of Bishop’s Sestina should be scanned as 1 anapest and 4 iambs. Bracket each foot in the line and mark the stress pattern in each one to show how Lennard hears this line:
From between the pages of the almanac = uux ux ux ux ux
14. Is a shorter line or a longer line more likely to contain a medial caesura? Why? Longer; “the longer the line, the more likely it is that the reader will pause either for breath, or because of a natural sense of stop commonly found in such a long clause.
15. Why does lineation matter so much in free verse? Because the line length of line varies in free verse and is not predetermined by the meter; e. g. any pentameter line must have 5 feet
16. How do both the colon and period in this Frost line contribute affect how we interpret the line?
The scent of apples: I am drowsing off.
Colon forces a semi-pause, whereas period
forces a longer pause, making reader contemplate in that pause
17. True of false: a poem should never be one
sentence long. false
18. How many syllables in any trochaic
tetrameter line? 8
19. What term is being defined here: “of lines,
couplets, or stanzas, not end-stopped, with sense and or syntax continuing into
the next line, couplet, or stanza.” enjambment
20. What are two specific ways you can use formal
properties of poetry to slow down a poetic line? Use medial
punctuation, falling rhythm
21. Give the full name of the type and length of meter used in these lines: anapestic tetrameter
Like the leaves of the forest when
Summer is green, uux uux uux uux
That host with
their banners at sunset were seen: ux uux uux uux (first foot of 2nd line is
variant, iamb instead of anapest)
22. Name each poetic foot by its accent pattern ( X = accented, U = unaccented)
a) UX b) X U U c) U U X d) XU e) X X iamb, dactyl, anapest, trochee, spondee
23.
What kind of sonnet has this form: 14 lines, iambic pentameter, ends in a sestet Italian or Petrarchan
24.
In what kind of lines does Lennard claim that we will
hear "rocking lineation"? blank verse or any lines in which the caesurae
always fall in the same place in the line (in blank verse, after the 2nd
iambic foot)
25.
Write one perfect English dactyl. UNderwear
WITH THE EXAM, TURN IN 2 COPIES OF YOUR SONNET
1 COPY OF YOUR INTERPRETATION OF A PUBLISHED SONNET
Bonus: 8 points
In
the free verse
we've seen from both Whitman and Ginsberg, are the stanzas isometric or heterometric? Heterometric (means different length of meter, therefore
different line length, and that’s true of both “Supermarket in