Choose three of the following questions and respond to them in at least one full page each.
Essay Question 1: Although written over a hundred years apart, Wordsworth’s “Tintern Abbey” and Yeats’ “Leda and the Swan” are both poems that reflect on particular moments in time and meditate on their historical significance. For Wordsworth, the moment was the beginning of the social revolution in France, and for Yeats it was the aftermath of the First World War (compared to the Trojan War—the subject of the poem). Compare and contrast the two different statements the poets are making in these poems about the role of man and Nature.
Essay Question 2: Both of Whitman’s poems, “O Captain! My Captain!” and “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d” and Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” rely on the first person point of view—the strength of the individual voice that we, the readers, hear in the poem. But the voices are very different from one another. The voice we hear in Whitman is energetic and forceful—the punctuation we see most often is the exclamation mark—or, if there is a question mark, the question is rhetorical, and Whitman quickly answers himself. In “Prufrock,” however, the questions are different: “Do I dare/Disturb the universe?” “And how should I presume?” Compare and contrast each poet’s use of the first person point of view and its tone in these two poems.
Essay Question 3: The Death of Ivan Ilyich and The Metamorphosis are similar in that each focus on a main character in a very realistic writing style. We, the readers, see the daily events, no matter how trivial, of these characters’ lives. The difference, though, is that Tolstoy has presented a brutally honest portrayal of real life while Kafka has presented a surreal portrayal—men never actually transform into bugs. But the main point of both is to make a comment on the social norms of the times. Compare and contrast the social statements that each author makes in these works.
Essay Question 4: Ghalib’s sacred version of “I’ve made my home next door to you” and Yeats’ “The Second Coming” both portray a god in a very nontraditional way. Ghalib casts his god as beloved person who torments worshippers, and Yeats portrays Jesus as a “rough beast.” Compare and contrast how these portrayals support the message in each poem.
