GRE Literature in English (REA) (26 page)

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D
IRECTIONS:

Which refers to Donne?

Which refers to Wordsworth?

Which refers to Swift?

1. As for his works in verse and prose,
   I own myself no judge of those;
   Nor can I tell what critics thought ‘im:
   But this I know, all people bought 'em,
   As with a moral view designed
   To cure the vices of mankind.
   

2. With____, whose muse on dromedary trots,
   Wreathe iron pokers into truelove knots;
   Rhyme's sturdy cripple, fancy's maze and clue,
   Wit's forge and fire-blast, meaning's press and screw.
   

3. Standing aloof in giant ignorance,
   Of thee I hear and of the Cyclades,
   As one who sits ashore and longs perchance
   To visit dolphin-coral in deep seas.
   So thou wast blind!—but then the veil was rent;
   For Jove uncurtained Heaven to let thee live,
   And Neptune made for thee a spumy tent,
   And Pan made sing for thee his forest-hive;...
   

4. In honored poverty thy voice did weave
   Songs consecrate to truth and liberty,—
   Deserting these, thou leavest me to grieve,
   Thus having been, that thou should cease to be.
   

5. Sheeplike, unsociable reptilian, two
   hell-divers splattered squawking on the water,
   loons devolving to a monochrome.
   You honored nature,
   helpless, elemental creature.
   The black stump of your hand
   just touched the waters under the earth
   and left them quickened with your name....
   

Her work “represents a romanticism
in extremis,
made public with grotesque clarity. Her poetry has been praised as a supreme example of the confessional mode in modern literature and disparaged as the ”longest suicide note ever written.“ The subject of some of it is her parents, who are treated unsympathetically (“Daddy, daddy, you bastard, I'm through”). She wrote an autobiographical novel about personality distintegration, and committed suicide.

 

This passage describes

1. Virginia Woolf.
   
2. Elizabeth Bishop.
   
3. Anne Sexton.
   
4. Sylvia Plath.
   
5. Adrienne Rich.
   

Which one contains the following lines?

 

And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight
Where ignorant armies clash by night.

Which one is a carpe diem poem?

The phrase “graveyard school” designates a group of eighteenth-century British poets who wrote long poems on death and immortality. The works of all of the following are associated with the graveyard school EXCEPT

1. Thomas Parnell.
   
2. Robert Blair.
   
3. Edward Young.
   
4. James Thompson.
   
5. Thomas Gray.
   

All of the following are sonnet sequences EXCEPT

1. Sidney's
   Astrophel and Stella.
   
2. Spencer's
   Amoretti.
   
3. Tennyson's
   In Memoriam A.H.H.
   
4. D. G. Rossetti's
   House of Life
   .
   
5. William Ellery Leonard's
   Two Lives
   .
   

A shudder in the loins engenders there
The broken wall, the burning roof and tower
And Agamemnon dead.

 

Being so caught up,
So mastered by the brute blood of the air, 5
Did she put on his knowledge with his power
Before the indifferent beak could let her drop?

Agamemnon was

1. killed in battle in the Trojan War.
   
2. killed by Circe while accompanying Odysseus home from the Trojan War.
   
3. murdered by his son Orestes.
   
4. murdered by his wife Clytemnestra.
   
5. pierced by an arrow shot by Artemis.
   

“His” (line 6) refers to

1. Agamemnon.
   
2. Priam.
   
3. Orestes.
   
4. Apollo.
   
5. Zeus.
   

Which is spoken by Shaw's Barbara?

Which is spoken by Wilde's Lady Bracknell?

Which is spoken by Congreve's Millamant?

1. Come to dinner when I please, dine in my dressing-room when I'm out of humor, without giving a reason. To have my closet inviolate; to be sole empress of my teatable, which you must never presume to approach without first asking leave. And lastly, wherever I am, you shall always knock at the door before you come in. These articles subscribed, if I continue to endure you a little longer, I may by degrees dwindle into a wife.
   

2. What business have you, miss, with
   preference
   and
   aversion
   ? They don't become a young woman; and you ought to know, that as both always wear off, ‘tis safest in matrimony to begin with a little
   aversion
   . I am sure I hated your poor dear uncle before marriage as if he'd been a black-amoor—and yet, miss, you are sensible what a wife I made! and when it pleased heav'n to release me from him, 'tis unknown what tears I shed!
   

3. I don't believe in that anymore. I believe that, before all else, I'm a human being, no less than you—or anyway, I ought to try to become one. I know the majority thinks you're right, Torvald, and plenty of books agree with you, too. But I can't go on believing what the majority says, or what's written in books. I have to think over these things myself and try to understand them.
   

4. I should have given you up and married the man who accepted it. After all, my dear old mother has more sense than any of you. I felt like her when I saw this place—felt that I must have it—that never, never, never could I let it go; only she thought it was the houses and the kitchen ranges and the linen and china, when it was really all the human souls to be saved; not weak souls in starved bodies, sobbing with gratitude for a scrap of bread and treacle, but fullfed, quarrelsome, snobbish, uppish creatures, all standing on their little rights and dignities, and thinking that my father ought to be greatly obliged to them for making so much money for him—and so he ought. That is where salvation is really wanted...I have got rid of the bribe of heaven.
   

5. I confess I feel somewhat bewildered by what you have just told me. To be born, or at any rate bred, in a handbag, whether it had handles or not, seems to me to display a contempt for the ordinary decencies of family life that remind me of the worst excesses of the French Revolution. And I presume you know what that unfortunate movement led to? As for the particular locality in which the handbag was found, a cloakroom at a railway station might serve to conceal a social indiscretion—has probably, indeed, been used for that purpose before now—but it could hardly be regarded as an assured basis for a recognized position in good society.
   

ROSALIND

ORLANDO

ROSALIND

In line 1 of Rosalind's speech, “by attorney” means

1. of natural causes.
   
2. of old age.
   
3. by proxy.
   
4. by someone else's hand.
   
5. in a courtroom.
   

Rosalind's account of Leander's death

1. is more accurate than that given by historians of Leander's day.
   
2. is intended to undercut romantic idealism.
   
3. is an exception to the general point she is making, the “exception that proves the rule.”
   
4. outlines a pattern of chivalric behavior that she wishes Orlando to emulate.
   
5. is intended to reinforce Orlando's current mode of behavior.
   

These lines are from

1. As You Like It.
   
2. Every Man in his Humour
   .
   
3. The Way of the World
   .
   
4. Much Ado about Nothing
   .
   
5. The Rivals
   .
   

The poet is the sayer, the namer, and represents beauty. He is a sovereign and stands on the centre. For the world is not painted or adorned, but is from the beginning beautiful; and God has not made some beautiful things, but Beauty is the creator of the universe...

For poetry was all written before time was, and whenever we are so finely organized that we can penetrate into that region where the air is music, we hear those primordial warblings and attempt to write them down, but we lose ever and anon a word or a verse and substitute something of our own, and thus mis-write the poem. The men of more delicate ear write down these cadences more faithfully, and these transcripts, though imperfect, become the songs of the nations. For nature is as truly beautiful as it is good, or as it is reasonable, and must as much appear as it must be done, or be known.

The author of this passage is a spokesman of

1. naturalism.
   
2. aestheticism.
   
3. transcendentalism.
   
4. realism.
   
5. surrealism.
   

The second paragraph contains ideas associated with

1. optimism.
   
2. materialism.
   
3. utilitarianism.
   
4. nihilism.
   
5. existentialism.
   

The author of this passage is also the author of

1. “The Raven.”
   
2. Walden.
   
3. On Liberty
   .
   
4. Self-Reliance.
   
5. Biographia Literaria.
   

But Lord Crist, whan that it remembreth me
Upon my youthe and on my jolitee,
It tikleth me aboute myn herte roote—
Unto this day it dooth myn herte boote
That I have had my world as in my time.
But age, alias, that al wol envenime,
Hath me biraft my beautee and my pith—
Lat go, farewel, the devel go therwith!

 

The flour is goon, ther is namore to telle:
The bren as I best can now moste I selle;
But it to be right merye wol I fonde.

What is the meaning of “envenime” in line 6?

1. Enlighten
   
2. Perfect
   
3. Envy
   
4. Poison
   
5. Delight
   

In the metaphor in lines 9 and 10, what is compared to what?

1. The speaker's body to the seed husk of cereal grain
   
2. The speaker's beauty to faded flowers
   
3. The speaker's body to cereal grain ready for harvesting
   
4. The speaker's beauty to flour that has gone bad
   
5. The speaker's body to flowers that are now difficult to sell
   

Which of the following best expresses the speaker's attitude toward past experience? The speaker

1. tries not to think about the past.
   
2. would like to do a number of things differently if given the chance.
   
3. feels pleasure in recalling good times past.
   
4. feels guilt for some previous flings.
   
5. regrets numerous missed opportunities.
   

The speaker might best be described as

1. a romantic.
   
2. a misanthrope.
   
3. an idealist.
   
4. a Pollyanna.
   
5. a pragmatist.
   

The speaker is

1. Alison in “The Miller's Tale.”
   
2. the Prioress.
   
3. the Wife of Bath.
   
4. the Pardoner.
   
5. Griselda in “The Clerk's Tale.”