NAME: ___________________________________________
Poetry Analysis Test Review
PERIOD: _____
The poetry analysis test will be on Tuesday, December 4. The 30 question objective test will consist of multiple choice questions that require you to analyze and interpret three poems: “Visiting the Museum of Modern Art”, “The
Sower” by Victor Hugo and “To Be of Use” by Marge Piercy, as well as revision questions from student’s poetry analysis essays. Annotate each poem, looking for patterns, poetic devices, and interpreting meaning. Make sure to look up any words you are unfamiliar with and break down any difficult sections. Number the lines in each poem and use the “HINTS” to guide your annotations. Students who prepare for this test by reading, annotating and analyzing each poem will be more than prepared for the test. YOU MUST HAVE THE POEMS/ANNOTATIONS WITH
YOU ON THE DAY OF THE TEST!! THE POEMS IN THEIR ENTIREITY WILL NOT BE ON THE TEST. You will turn your annotations in with your test.
Visiting the Museum of Modern Art
A rush of museum visitors swirl past me as I sit on the floor, like a rock in a river, to study this painting.
I am the only one who stopped.
A spill of yellow, cymbals, a cacophony of color splutters and spins, pulling my eye down the canvas of this strange, mesmerizing painting.
Hidden in the bottom corner, a clue, a hint, a surprising shadow. I catch my breath, feeling as if I've received an invitation to another world, an other-world.
How is this possible? How did the artist beckon me inside an open door?
I feel as if I'm all alone in the museum, walking across a threshold, stepping into a space I've been before.
Suddenly I'm seeing the crush of a crowded subway train, a sparrow beating against a windowpane, rubber ducks and roller coaster rides, my grandmother's old house, a long-lost dog, a wind-up frog I've nearly forgotten.
The guard tells me to move along, the museum is closing. I leave knowing
I'll be back tomorrow to step inside the mysteries of a painting titled:
You Decide.
HINTS  Note the following things in your annotations:
 details and images in stanzas 2 & 3 – what do they suggest about the speaker in the poem?
 poem’s form
 poem’s theme – what is the poet saying about the subject of the poem?
 shifts in tone
 the effect of referring to a painting as an “open door” or “walking across a threshold”
 figurative language and its effect in stanza 2
 connotation of the word “beckon”
 relationship between imagery, tone and main idea

The Sower by Victor Hugo (translated by George Murray)
Peaceful and cool, the twilight grey
Draws a dim curtain o’er the day,
While in my cottage-porch I lurk
And watch the last lone hour of work.
The fields around are bathed in dew,
And, with emotion filled, I view
An old man clothed in rags, who throws
The seed amid the channeled rows.
His shadowy form is looming now
High o’er the furrows of the plough;
Each motion of his arm betrays
A boundless faith in future days.
He stalks along the ample plain,
Comes, goes, and flings abroad the grain;
Unnoted, through the dreamy haze
With meditative soul I gaze.
At last, the vapours of the night
Dilate to heav’n the man’s height,
Till every gesture of his hand
Seems to my eyes sublimely grand!
To Be of Use by Marge Piercy
The people I love the best
Jump into work head first without dallying in the shallows and swim off with sure strokes almost out of sight.
They seems to become natives of that element, the black sleek heads of seals bouncing like half-submerged balls.
I love people who harness themselves, an ox to a heavy cart, who pull like water buffalo, with massive patience, who strain in the mud and muck to move things forward, who do what has to be done, again and again.
I want to be with people who submerge in the task, who go into fields to harvest and work in a row and pass the bags along, who are not parlor generals and field deserters but move in a common rhythm when the food must come in or the fire be put out.
The work of the world is common as mud.
Botched, it smears the hands, crumbles to dust.
But the thing worth doing well done has a shape that satisfies, clean and evident.
Greek amphoras for wine or oil,
Hopi vases that held corn, are put in museums but you know they are made to be used.
The pitcher cries for water to carry and a person for work that is real.
HINTS  Note the following things in your annotations:
 comparison in stanza 1 – what is being compared to what? type of figurative language?
 structure of all four stanzas
 rhyme scheme
 alliteration, assonance
 speaker’s attitude toward the subject
(*stanza 5)
 diction (*stanza 4)
 connections between “The Sower” and
“To Be of Use”
HINTS  Note the following things in your annotations:
 metaphor and its meaning in stanza 1
 similes
 effect of the repetition of “who” and
“again” in stanza 2
 image the alliteration creates in line 10
 effect of the repetition of the verb “do” in line 20
 personification in stanza 4
 meaning of “work that is real”
 connection between “The Sower” and
“To Be of Use”