English III H Final Exam Review

Romantic Period
Time Period: 1798-1832
Leaders:
Political Changes:
Social Changes:
Economic Changes:

Coleridge: Kubla Khan
Poetic Devices
Alliteration (Kubla Khan
Assonance (repetition of the same vowel sounds)
twice five miles (6)
fast thick pants (18)
Consonance (repetition of the same consonant sounds in places other than the beginnings of word)
romantic chasm (12)
waning moon was haunted (15)
Onomatopoeia
Theme: Nature and its supernatural powers, act of artistic creation, the triumph of the
imagination, and the way that society treats artists: those who are able to create their works of art
out of thin air.
Tone:
Summary: The unnamed speaker of the poem tells of how a man named Kubla Khan traveled to
the land of Xanadu. In Xanadu, Kubla found a fascinating pleasure-dome that was a miracle of
rare device because the dome was made of caves of ice and located in a sunny area. The speaker
describes the contrasting composition of Xanadu. While there are gardens blossoming with
incense-bearing trees and sunny spots of greenery, across the deep romantic chasm in Xanadu
there are caverns measureless to man and a fountain from which huge fragments vaulted like
rebounding hail. Amid this hostile atmosphere of Nature, Kubla also hears ancestral voices
prophesying war. However, Kubla finds relief from this tumultuous atmosphere through his
discovery of the miraculous sunny pleasure-dome made of ice. In the last stanza of the poem, the
narrator longs to revive a song about Mount Abora that he once heard a woman play on a
dulcimer. The speaker believes that the song would transport him to a dream world in which he
could build that dome in air and in which he can drink the milk of Paradise.
The Victorian Period
Time Period: 1832-1901
Leaders: Queen Victoria

Alfred Lord Tennyson: Crossing the Bar
Poetic Devices
End rhyme
Metaphor (controlling and extended)
Theme: Nature and its supernatural powers, act of artistic creation, the triumph of the
imagination, and the way that society treats artists: those who are able to create their works of art
out of thin air.
Tone:
Summary: In this poem of farewell, crossing the bar, or leaving the last shoal before the open sea,
stands for dying. The speaker represents the passage from life to death as a gentle, inevitable pull
of the tide. He requests no moaning or sadness of farewell from those left behind and
expresses the hope of seeing this Pilot when he reaches his destination.

Alfred Lord Tennyson: The Eagle
Poetic Devices
CacophonyMeans bad sound and refers to words combining sharp or harsh sounds (ex.
He clasps the crag with crooked hands)
Personification
Metaphor
Simile
Allusion
Tone
End Rhyme
TercetThree lines with one rhyme
The wrinkled sea beneath him crawls;
He watches from his mountain walls,
And like a thunderbolt he falls.
Theme: Death and Acceptance, Premature Death, Death and humor, Beauty of Nature, Love
Tone:
Summary:

Robert Browning: My Last Duchess
Poetic Devices
Dramatic Monologue: A poem in which a character addresses one or more listeners who
remain silent or whose replies are not revealed.
Theme:
Tone:
Summary: Browning identified his speaker as Alfonso II, the Duke of Ferrara, a Renaissance
nobleman. The Dukes first wife, of three in all, was a fourteen year-old girl whom the Duke,
shortly after marrying, left for two years. She died about a year after his return. It is believed that
she was poisoned.

Robert Browning: Porphyrias Lover
Poetic Devices
Dramatic Monologue: A poem in which a character addresses one or more listeners who remain
silent or whose replies are not revealed.
Theme:
Tone:
Summary: The speaker lives in a cottage in the countryside. His lover, a blooming young woman
named Porphyria, comes in out of a storm and proceeds to make a fire and bring cheer to the
cottage. She embraces the speaker, offering him her bare shoulder. He tells us that he does not
speak to her. Instead, he says, she begins to tell him how she has momentarily overcome societal
strictures to be with him. He realizes that she worship*s+ him at this instant. Realizing that she
will eventually give in to societys pressures, and wanting to preserve the moment, he wraps her
hair around her neck and strangles her. He then toys with her corpse, opening the eyes and
propping the body up against his side. He sits with her body this way the entire night, the speaker
remarking that God has not yet moved to punish him.

Elizabeth Barrett Browning: Sonnet 43
Poetic Devices
Parallelism
Repetition
End Rhyme/slant rhyme
Petrarchan Sonnet (Italian)
--an octave (eight lines)
--a sestet (six lines)
Theme:
Tone:
Summary: The speaker lives in a cottage in the countryside. His lover, a blooming young woman
named Porphyria, comes in out of a storm and proceeds to make a fire and bring cheer to the
cottage. She embraces the speaker, offering him her bare shoulder. He tells us that he does not
speak to her. Instead, he says, she begins to tell him how she has momentarily overcome societal
strictures to be with him. He realizes that she worship*s+ him at this instant. Realizing that she
will eventually give in to societys pressures, and wanting to preserve the moment, he wraps her
hair around her neck and strangles her. He then toys with her corpse, opening the eyes and
propping the body up against his side. He sits with her body this way the entire night, the speaker
remarking that God has not yet moved to punish him.

Thomas Hardy: Ah, Are You Digging on My Grave?
Poetic Devices
Tone -- The attitude a writer takes toward the reader, a subject, or a character.
Anticlimax When something trivial or comical occurs at the point in a narrative when
one expects something important or serious.
Irony Contrast or discrepancy between expectation and reality
Theme:
Tone:
Summary: The speaker, a dead woman, asks if the digger on her grave is her beloved, but she is
told that he has just married someone else. She asks if her kin are digging, but she is told that
they see no point in tending her grave. She asks if its her enemy who digs, but she is told that her
enemy no longer cares about her. Finally, she learns that the digger is her dog, merely burying a
bone.

Thomas Hardy: When I Was One and Twenty
Poetic Devices
Tone
Diction
Theme:
Tone:
Summary:

A.E. Houseman: To an Athlete Dying Young
Poetic Devices
Allusion
parallel structure
metaphoric language
Theme:
Tone:
Summary: the speaker addresses a youth athlete who once received the towns adulation and was carried
aloft in victory. Now the young mans body is held high in a funeral procession. The speaker claims that the
athlete is lucky to have died young, as he will never see his records surpassed or his name forgotten.
Instead he will amaze the strength-less dead with his unfading youth and glory.
The Twentieth Century
Time Period: 1900s
Leaders:

Rupert Brooke: The Soldier
Poetic Devices
Alliteration
Repletion
Theme: Death, Warfare, Patriotism, man and the natural world
Tone:
Summary: The speaker informs his audience what to think should he die. He tells them only to consider
that a portion of some foreign field will be "forever England" as a result of his death. The soldier, who was
raised and nurtured by his country, England, will be buried in the earth. After he dies, the soldier will go to
a peaceful, English heaven, where he will re-experience all his English memories.

Wilfred Owen: Dulce et Decorum Est
Poetic Devices
Metaphor
Alliteration
Simile
Theme: Suffering, Warfare, Patriotism, Versions of reality
Tone:
Summary: The boys are bent over like old beggars carrying sacks, and they curse and cough through the
mud until the "haunting flares" tell them it is time to head toward their rest. As they march some men are
asleep, others limp with bloody feet as they'd lost their boots. All are lame and blind, extremely tired and
deaf to the shells falling behind them. Suddenly there is gas, and the speaker calls, "Quick, boys!" There is
fumbling as they try to put on their helmets in time. One soldier is still yelling and stumbling about as if he
is on fire. Through the dim "thick green light" the speaker sees him fall like he is drowning. The drowning
man is in the speaker's dreams, always falling, choking. The speaker says that if you could follow behind
that wagon where the soldier's body was thrown, watching his eyes roll about in his head, see his face "like
a devil's sick of sin", hear his voice gargling frothy blood at every bounce of the wagon, sounding as
"obscene as cancer" and bitter as lingering sores on the tongue, then you, "my friend", would not say with
such passion and conviction to children desirous of glory, "the old lie" of "Dulce et decorum est"..

Siegfried Sassoon: The Rear-Guard
Poetic Devices
Onomatopoeia
Imagery
Theme: Ignorance in humanity has lead to a great deal of suffering, and it's a tragedy
Tone: realistic
Summary: This poem takes place on a massive defensive line during WWI; the first stanza is a soldier
stumbling through the dark of a bunker fifty feet underground. He comes upon a soldier lying in a heap and
asks him where headquarters is; the soldier does not reply, so our protagonist kicks him. The soldier on the
ground turns out to have been dead for ten days, and so our protagonist goes stumbling on in the dark until
he reaches the battle overhead.

Primo Levi: On the Bottom
Poetic Devices
Imagery
Repetition
Theme:
Tone:
Summary:

Ellie Wiesel: Never Shall I Will Forget
Poetic Devices
Alliteration
Anaphora (the repetition of a word or phrase at the beginning of a line)
Imagery
Theme: Holocaust, time, memory, and death
Tone: inconsistent (mournful and sad to angry and animosity)
Summary: Ellie claims that his faith is utterly destroyed, yet at the same time says that he will never forget
these things even if he live*s+ as long as God Himself. After completely denying the existence of God, he
refers to Gods existence in the final line. As mentioned before, Wiesel wrote elsewhere, My anger rises
up within faith and not outside it. Ellie reflects this position, which is particularly visible throughout this
passage. Despite saying he has lost all faith, it is clear that Ellie is actually struggling with his faith and his
God. Just as he is never able to forget the horror of that night, he is never able to reject completely his
heritage and his religion.

Winston Churchill: Blood, Sweat, and Tears
Poetic Devices
Anaphora
Simile
Metaphors
Hyperbole
Analogies
Theme:
Tone: Serious, hopeful, determined
Summary:



Virginia Woolf: A Haunted House
Poetic Devices
Alliteration
Anaphora
Hyperbole
Metaphor
Onomatopoeia
Paradox
Theme: love
Tone: playful and lighthearted
Summary: .A man and woman who occupy a house hear male and female ghosts wandering about
the dwelling as they talk about a finding a treasure. When they were alive, the ghosts had
occupied the house more than a century before the current residents. After the man died, he
rejoined the woman ghost at the house they once occupied, the same house where the living man
and woman now dwell. The narration reveals that it is the rediscovery of the places in and around
the house where the ghosts spent little moments expressing their love for each other. The female
ghost says, "Here, sleeping; in the garden reading; laughing, rolling apples in the loft. Here we left
our treasure."

William Butler Yeats: The Second Coming
Poetic Devices
Metaphors
Rhetorical Question
Theme: Good Vs. Evil, Society and Class, Warfare, Versions of Reality, Memory and the past
Tone: presents himself as a moral authority and feels comfortable making general
pronouncements about the state of things
Summary: The poem begins with the image of a falcon flying out of earshot from its human master. In
medieval times, people would use falcons or hawks to track down animals at ground level. In this image,
however, the falcon has gotten itself lost by flying too far away, which we can read as a reference to the
collapse of traditional social arrangements in Europe at the time Yeats was writing.
In the fourth line, the poem abruptly shifts into a description of "anarchy" and an orgy of violence in which
"the ceremony of innocence is drowned." The speaker laments that only bad people seem to have any
enthusiasm nowadays. At line 9, the second stanza of the poem begins by setting up a new vision. The
speaker takes the violence which has engulfed society as a sign that "the Second Coming is at hand." He
imagines a sphinx in the desert, and we are meant to think that this mythical animal, rather than Christ, is
what is coming to fulfill the prophecy from the Biblical Book of Revelation. At line 18, the vision ends as
"darkness drops again," but the speaker remains troubled. Finally, at the end of the poem, the speaker asks
a rhetorical question which really amounts to a prophecy that the beast is on its way to Bethlehem, the
birthplace of Christ, to be born into the world.

Dylan Thomas: Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night
Poetic Devices
Alliteration
Assonance
Metaphor (good night compared to death)
Personification (Old age represents and is compared to a person)
Oxymoron (good night)
Simile: (blind eyes could blaze like meteors)
Theme:
Tone:
Summary:

Seamus Heany: Digging
Poetic Devices
Alliteration
Repletion
Theme:
Tone:
Summary: