Poetry Mock 1
Close reading of unseen poetry.
2 questions • Estimated time: 25-30 minutes
How to Use This Mock
- Read each question carefully
- Attempt your own answer first — spend at least 5 minutes thinking
- Only reveal the model answer after you've tried
- Compare your reasoning to the model answer
Consider these opening lines:
'I wandered lonely as a cloud
That floats on high o'er vales and hills'
What is unusual about the simile in these lines? How does it shape our understanding of the speaker?
Model Answer
The simile 'lonely as a cloud' is striking because clouds aren't typically associated with loneliness — we don't usually attribute emotional states to meteorological phenomena. This is an example of pathetic fallacy, projecting human emotion onto nature.
But look more carefully: the simile actually works in reverse of the expected direction. Usually, we use natural phenomena to illuminate human experience ('fierce as a lion'). Here, Wordsworth uses a human emotion to characterise a cloud. The lonely wanderer becomes cloud-like, not the other way around.
This shapes our understanding of the speaker as someone who identifies so strongly with nature that the boundary between self and landscape becomes blurred. The speaker doesn't merely observe nature — they become part of it. The 'floating' quality suggests a dreamy, detached consciousness, perhaps someone lost in thought or memory.
The word 'wandered' is key too: it implies aimlessness, leisure, perhaps a Romantic rejection of purposeful activity. This is not a journey with a destination but an openness to experience.
This is Wordsworth, and these ideas connect to his broader Romantic project of finding the sublime in nature and dissolving the boundary between observer and observed.
Why might a poet choose to write a sonnet about the death of a loved one? What possibilities and constraints does the form offer?
Model Answer
The sonnet form brings several properties that can be either exploited or worked against when addressing death:
Constraints as Expression:
- The 14-line limit forces compression — grief must be distilled rather than sprawled. This can mirror how profound loss can leave us speechless, reducing experience to essentials.
- The formal rhyme scheme can represent the speaker trying to impose order on chaotic emotion, or conversely, can feel painfully inadequate to raw grief.
The Volta (Turn):
- The structural turn (typically at line 9 in a Petrarchan sonnet, or before the couplet in a Shakespearean) offers a natural pivot point: perhaps from despair to acceptance, from past to present, from the loved one to the self.
- A poet might use this to show the mind's movement through grief, or subvert it — refusing the expected resolution.
The Tradition:
- Sonnets carry a long association with love poetry (Petrarch, Shakespeare, Sidney). Writing an elegy in sonnet form invokes this tradition — suggesting that mourning the dead is a form of love poem, or perhaps that love and loss are inseparable.
The Couplet (Shakespearean form):
- The final couplet traditionally offers epigrammatic closure. For elegy, this could provide consolation, or refuse it. The expectation of closure makes its absence more powerful.
Good candidates would discuss specific examples: Milton's 'On His Deceased Wife', Rossetti's sonnets, or contemporary examples like Heaney's 'Clearances'.