Deborah Tucker
AP LITERATURE
“An Echo Sonnet: To An Empty Page” Robert Pack
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Voice:
Echo:
How from emptiness can I make a start?
And starting, must I master joy or grief?
But is there consolation in the heart?
Oh cold reprieve, where’s natural relief?
Leaf blooms, burns red before delighted eyes.
Here beauty makes of dying, ecstasy.
Yet what’s the end of our life’s long disease?
If death is not, who is my enemy?
Then you are glad that I must end in sleep?
I’d leap into the dark if dark were true.
And in that night would you rejoice or weep?
What contradiction makes you take this view?
I feel your calling leads me where I go.
But whether happiness is there, you know.
Start
Grief
Art
Leaf
Dies
See
Ease
Me
Leap
True
Weep
You
Go
No
Prompt
Write a well-organized paragraph in which you analyze how the formal elements of the poem
contribute to its meaning.
Deborah Tucker
AP LITERATURE
“The Death of a Toad” Richard Wilbur
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A toad the power mower caught,
Chewed and clipped of a leg, with a hobbling hop has got
To the garden verge, and sanctuaried him
Under the cineraria leaves, in the shade
Of the ashen and heartshaped leaves, in a dim,
Low, and a final glade.
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The rare original heartsbleed goes,
Spends in the earthen hide, in the folds and wizenings, flows
In the gutters of the banked and staring eyes. He lies
As still as if he would return to stone,
And soundlessly attending, dies
Toward some deep monotone,
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Toward misted and ebullient seas
And cooling shores, toward lost Amphibia’s emperies.
Day dwindles, drowning and at length is gone
In the wide and antique eyes, which still appear
To watch, across the castrate lawn,
The haggard daylight steer.
Prompt
Write a well-organized essay in which you explain how formal elements such as structure,
syntax, diction and imagery reveal the speaker’s response to the death of a toad.
Deborah Tucker
AP LITERATURE
“Piano” D. H. Lawrence
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Softly, in the dusk, a woman is singing to me;
Taking me back down the vista of years, till I see
A child sitting under the piano, in the boom of the tingling strings
And pressing the small, poised feet of a mother who smiles as she sings.
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In spite of myself, the insidious mastery of song
Betrays me back, till the heart of me weeps to belong
To the old Sunday evenings at home, with winter outside
And hymns in the cosy parlor, the tinkling piano our guide.
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So now it is vain for the singer to burst into clamour
With the great black piano appassionato. The glamour
Of childish days is upon me, my manhood is cast
Down in the flood of remembrance, I weep like a child for the past.
Prompt
Write a well-organized essay in which you explain how formal elements such as structure,
syntax, diction and imagery reveal the speaker’s response to the situation.
Deborah Tucker
AP LITERATURE
Word Study
indidious
wizen
monotone
ebullient
haggard
vista
reprieve
consolation
appassionato
clamour
parlor
Directions
1.
2.
3.
4.
Using your own words, define the words above.
Identify the antonym of each word.
Give the etymology of each.
Group the words in such a way as to make them more memorable.