Honors Essay Questions for Poetry Test

Explicate the poem. Be sure to identify what the structure of the poem and why. In order to explicate the poem properly, you need to pull all of your knowledge of poetry such as figures of speech, sound devices, rhyme, rhyme scheme, connotation and denotation, and rhythm. I do not expect you to use all of these techniques; use the ones that apply to your explication with a clear explanation of why.

“My love is as a fever, longing still”
William Shakespeare

1 My love is as a fever, longing still
For that which longer nurseth the disease,
Feeding on that which doth preserve the ill,
The uncertain sickly appetite to please.
5 My reason, the physician to my love,
Angry that his prescriptions are not kept,
Hath left me, and I desperate now approve
Desire is death, which physic did except.
Past cure I am, now reason is past care,
10 And frantic-mad with evermore unrest;
My thoughts and my discourse as madmen's are,
At random from the truth vainly express'd;
For I have sworn thee fair and thought thee bright,
Who art as black as hell, as dark as night



1.
Richard Wright

I am nobody:
A red sinking autumn sun
Took my name away.


“Manhole Covers”
Karl Shapiro

1 The beauty of manhole covers--what of that?
Like medals struck by a great savage khan,
Like Mayan calendar stones, unliftable, indecipherable,
Not like the old electrum, chased and scored,
5 Mottoed and sculptured to a turn,
But notched and whelked and pocked and smashed
With the great company names
Gentle Bethlehem, smiling United States.
This rustproof artifact of my street,
10 Long after roads are melted away will lie
Sidewise in the grave of the iron-old world,
Bitten at the edges,
Strong with its cryptic American,
Its dated beauty.