GRE Literature in English (REA) (30 page)

If all the world and love were young,
And truth in every shepherd's tongue,
These pretty pleasures might me move
To live with thee and be thy love.

 

Time drives the flocks from field to fold
When rivers rage and rocks grow cold,
And Philomel becometh dumb;
The rest complains of cares to come.

 

The flowers do fade, and wanton fields
To wayward winter reckoning yields;
A honey tongue, a heart of gall,
Is fancy's spring, but sorrow's fall.

These lines are from a poem (“The Nymph's Reply to the Shepherd”) by ___, in reply to a poem (“The Passionate Shepherd to His Love”) by __. Which of the following correctly completes the preceding sentence?

1. Shakespeare ... Surrey
   
2. Raleigh ... Marlowe
   
3. Marvell ... Spenser
   
4. Waller ... Lovelace
   
5. Jonson ... Herrick
   

The nymph asserts that the idyllic world portrayed by the shepherd is

1. unrealistic, ignoring changes that come with the passage of time, harsh aspects of pastoral life, and such things as the need to provide for old age.
   
2. no longer viable because time has brought about societal and economic changes that make pastoral life virtually impossible.
   
3. tempting and possible, but not sufficiently enticing because she does not trust this shepherd.
   
4. not appealing because such a pastoral life leads ultimately to a rustication and regret that she does not intend to experience.
   
5. acceptable to the young, but not to her because she is no longer young.
   

Philomel (line 7) was

1. the goddess of the fields and hence of fertility.
   
2. a minor deity associated with rural locations and sometimes associated with pastoral poetry.
   
3. turned into a nightingale or swallow but unable to sing because she betrayed her mate.
   
4. a country girl who was abandoned by her lover after having been seduced by him.
   
5. a maiden whose tongue was cut out by her sister's husband so she could not reveal that he raped her.
   

Which of the following best expresses the idea contained in lines 11 and 12?

1. Spring is a time of plenty, but fall is a time of want.
   
2. Submitting to fancy's sweet talk will eventually lead to remorse or bitterness.
   
3. We may think spring is a time of happiness, but experience teaches us it contains an equal portion of sorrow.
   
4. Spring fills the heart with thoughts of love and the ability to express them, but they eventually fade.
   
5. Although fancy rules the heart, sorrow follows a fall from virtue.
   

Another response to “The Passionate Shepherd to His Love” entitled “The Bait” was written by

1. John Skelton.
   
2. Michael Drayton.
   
3. John Donne.
   
4. George Herbert.
   
5. Sir John Suckling.
   

When I heard the learn'd astronomer
When the proofs, the figures, were ranged in columns before me,
When I was shown the charts and diagrams, to add, divide, and measure them,
When I sitting heard the astronomer where he lectured with much applause in the lecture-room,
How soon unaccountable I became tired and sick,
Till rising and gliding out I wander'd off by myself,
In the mystical moist night-air, and from time to time,
Look'd up in perfect silence at the stars.

All of the following oppositions or contrasts are present in the poem EXCEPT

1. applause/silence.
   
2. scientific analysis/mysticism.
   
3. mathematical certainty/error.
   
4. light/dark.
   
5. group/individual.
   

Which of the following words has more than one meaning in context?

1. Figures (line 2)
   
2. Measure (line 3)
   
3. Applause (line 4)
   
4. Mystical (line 7)
   
5. Perfect (line 8)
   

The author of the poem is

1. Emerson.
   
2. James Russell Lowell.
   
3. Sandburg.
   
4. Whitman.
   
5. Frost.
   

Men are but children of a larger growth;
Our appetites as apt to change as theirs,
And full as craving too, and full as vain;
And yet the soul, shut up in her dark room,
Viewing so clear abroad, at home sees nothing;
But, like a mole in earth, busy and blind,
Works all her folly up, and casts it outward
To the world's open view: thus I discovered,
And blamed the love of ruined Antony;
Yet wish that I were he, to be so ruined.

“Her” in line 7 refers to

1. Cleopatra.
   
2. soul.
   
3. mole.
   
4. lust or passion.
   
5. appetite.
   

Dolabella has “discovered” Antony's love primarily because

1. he has used stealth to observe Antony in the latter's unguarded moments.
   
2. he has observed Antony in two perspectives, from afar and up close.
   
3. he has had the advantage of viewing him from “abroad,” which has given him the emotional detachment necessary for objective analysis.
   
4. Antony's increasing vanity has aroused Dolabella's suspicions.
   
5. Antony's “soul” has revealed it to him.
   

Dolabella's attitude toward Antony can best be described as one of

1. unqualified admiration.
   
2. compassionate understanding.
   
3. bitter disillusionment.
   
4. moral condemnation.
   
5. self-congratulatory superiority.
   

This passage is from

1. Shakespeare's
   Antony and Cleopatra.
   
2. Shakespeare's
   Julius Caesar
   .
   
3. Samuel Daniel's
   Cleopatra.
   
4. Dryden's
   All for Love
   .
   
5. Shaw's
   Caesar and Cleopatra.
   

Cou'd our first Father, at his toilsome Plough,
Thorns in his Path, and Labour on his Brow,
Cloath'd only in a rude, unpolish'd Skin;
Cou'd he, a vain, fantastick Nymph have seen,
In all her Airs, in all her Antick Graces;
Her various Fashions, and more various Faces;
How had it pos'd that Skill, which late Assign'd
Just Appellations to each sev‘ral Kind,
A right Idea of the Sight to frame,
T' have guest from what new Element she came,
T' have hit the wavering Form, or giv'n this Thing a Name.

“Father” in line 1 refers to

1. God.
   
2. time.
   
3. Adam.
   
4. Satan.
   
5. George Washington.
   

“Pos'd” in line 7 means

1. perplexed.
   
2. possessed.
   
3. positioned.
   
4. undermined.
   
5. contradicted.
   

The tone of the poem can best be described as

1. nostalgic.
   
2. angry.
   
3. solemn.
   
4. prayerful.
   
5. jocose.
   

“Frame” (line 9) is closest in meaning to

1. recall.
   
2. analyze.
   
3. formulate.
   
4. enclose.
   
5. devise falsely.
   

“Skill” (line 7) refers to the ability to

1. solve puzzles from slight clues.
   
2. interpret the ways of God to man.
   
3. recognize the presence of incorporeal beings.
   
4. deduce valid conclusions from premises.
   
5. name things appropriately.
   

“Thing” in the last line refers to

1. Skill.
   
2. Appellation.
   
3. Element.
   
4. Nymph.
   
5. Idea.
   

Which describes John Ford's '
Tis Pity She's a Whore?

Which describes Tennesee Williams'
A Streetcar Named Desire?

1. Militant in its pride in the middle-class, this prose tragedy recounts the downfall and eventual execution of a naive apprentice who is seduced by a more experienced woman who leads him to embezzle from his employer and finally to murder his uncle to satisfy her greed. The play is overtly didactic; its author defined the end of tragedy as “the exciting of the passions in order to the correcting such of them as are criminal, either in their nature, or through their excess.”
   

2. This play deals with a statesman and saint whose individualism, spirituality, and wit help him preserve his “ada mantine sense of his own self” while struggling with political forces that ultimately destroy him. His refusal to compromise costs him his life, but establishes him as a man of strong character and integrity. The author uses the device of the Common Man to address the audience directly and to comment on the action of the play.
   

3. This play deals with the incestuous love of brother and sister (Giovanni and Annabella). The pregnant Annabella marries one of her suitors, but refuses to name her lover after her pregnancy is discovered. Giovanni eventually stabs Annabella to forestall her husband's vengeance after the latter learns the identity of Annabella's lover. The husband and Giovanni are both killed in the final scene of the play. Like other plays by the same author, this work is marked by its powerful portrayal of melancholy and despair.
   

4. This expressionist play deals with the perversion of human strength by technological progress. Its protagonist, a stupid and brutal stoker on a transatlantic liner, is a study in dehumanization, literally subservient to machines. His growing discontent and ineffectual rebellion end when he is crushed to death by a beast he has liberated in a zoo. The author's work has been criticized for its social pleading, but praised for its depiction of the suffering of common men and for its probing of the psychology of alienation.
   

5. This play's heroine has “always depended on the kindness of strangers.” Horrified by the contrast between her idealized vision of life at their former family estate and the squalid surroundings of her sister's home and her brother-in-law's crudity, she relies on liquor and self-delusions about her age, beauty, and former suitors in trying to cope with an uncongenial present. She is eventually raped by her brother-in-law and committed to a mental institution. The author's plays include a number of then-controversial subjects, such as castration, drug addiction, homosexuality, nymphomania, and cannibalism.
   

A doll in the doll-maker's house
Looks at the cradle and bawls:
“That is an insult to us.”
But the oldest of all the dolls,
Who had seen, being kept for show,
Generations of his sort,
Out-screams the whole shelf: “Although
There's not a man can report
Evil of this place,
The man and the woman bring
Hither, to our disgrace,
A noisy and filthy thing.”
Hearing him groan and stretch
The doll-maker's wife is aware
Her husband has heard the wretch
And crouched by the arm of his chair,
She murmurs into his ear,
Head upon shoulder leant:
“My dear, my dear, O dear,
It was an accident.”

The oldest doll's objections metaphorically point primarily to a contrast between

1. good and evil.
   
2. life and art.
   
3. happiness and sorrow.
   
4. permanence and impermanence.
   
5. single life and married life.
   

The doll-maker can best be seen as a metaphor for

1. the destructive effects of time on all men's lives.
   
2. the vanity of all earthly striving.
   
3. the artist who must live in the real world but create idealized objects.
   
4. the henpecked husband.
   
5. man's essential loneliness and isolation.
   

The author of this poem also wrote

1. “Ah, Are You Digging on My Grave?”
   
2. “Sailing to Byzantium.”
   
3. “Ode to the West Wind.”
   
4. “Fern Hill.”
   
5. The British Museum Reading Room
   .
   

As though to breathe were life! Life piled on life
Were all too little, and of one to me
Little remains; but every hour is saved
From that eternal silence, something more,
A bringer of new things; and vile it were
For some three suns to store and hoard myself ...

This is my son, mine own Telemachus,
To whom I leave the scepter and the isle—
Well-loved of me, discerning to fulfill
This labor, by slow prudence to make mild
A rugged people, and through soft degrees
Subdue them to the useful and the good.
Most blameless is he, centered in the sphere
Of common duties, decent not to fail
In offices of tenderness, and pay
Meet adoration to my household gods,
When I am gone. He works his work, I mine.