Passage 4
Once upon a midnight dreary, while i pondered, weak and weary,
Over many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore,
While I nodded, nearly napping, suddenly there came a tapping,
As of some one gently rapping, rapping at my chamber door.
"Tis some visitor," I muttered, "tapping at my chamber door—
Only this, and nothing more. "
Ah, distinctly I remember it was in the bleak December,
And each separate dying ember wrought its ghost upon the floor.
Eagerly I wished the morrow; —vainly I had tried to borrow
From my books surcease of sorrow-sorrow for the lost.
1. Who is the writer of these lines?
2. What is the title of this poem from which the selection is selected?
3. Recognize the sound devices in the following lines. LI ________ L4 ________L7________ L10________
4. Describe the mood of this poem.
Answers:
1. Edgar Allan Poe
2. The Raven
3. LI—Alliteration, L4—Onomatopoeia, L7—Internal rhyme, L10—Assonance
4. A sense of melancholy over the death of a beloved beautiful young woman pervades the whole poem, the portrayal of a young man grieving for his lost Leno-re, his grief turned to madness under the steady one-word repetition of the talking bird.
Passage 5
Lo! in you brilliant window-niche
How statue-like I see thee stand,
The agate lamp within thy hand!
Ah, Psyche, from the regions which
Are Holy-Land!
1. This is the last stanza of a poem To Helen. Who wrote this poem To Heleni
2. With whom is Helen associated in Line 4 of the present stanza?
3. Who is Psyche?
Answers
1. Edgar Allan Poe
2. Psyche
3. Psyche is the goddess of the soul in Greek mythology.
Passage 6
To go into solitude, a man needs to retire as much from his chamber as from society. I am not solitary whilst I read and write, though nobody is with me. But if a man would be alone, let him look at the stars. The rays that come from those heavenly worlds, will separate between him and vulgar things. One might think the atmosphere was made transparent with this design, to give man, in the heavenly bodies, the perpetual presence of the sublime. Seen in the streets of cities, how great they are! If the stars should appear one night in a thousand years, how would men believe and adore; and preserve for many generations the remembrance of the city of God which had been shown! But every night come out these preachers of beauty, and light the universe with their admonishing smile.
Questions:
1. This paragraph is taken from a famous essay. What is the name of the essay?
2. Who is the author?
3. What does the author say would happen if the stars appeared one night in a thousand years?
4. Give a peculiar term to cover the author's belief.
Answers:
1. Nature
2. Ralph Waldo Emerson
3. Then, the men cannot believe and adore the God, cannot preserve there membrance of the city of God which had been shown.
4. Transcendentalism
Passage 7
Standing on the bare ground—my head bathed by the blithe air and uplifted into infinite space—all mean egotism vanishes. I become a transparent eyeball; I am nothing; I see all; the currents of the Universal Being circulate through me; I am part or particle of God.
Questions:
1. Which work is this selection taken from?
2. How do you understand the philosophical ideas in these words?
Answers:
1. Nature
2. Ralph Waldo Emerson regards nature as the purest, and the most sanctifying moral influence on man, and advocated a direct intuition of a spiritual and immanent God in nature. In this connection, Emerson' s emotional experiences are exemplary in more ways than one.
3. Now this is a moment of "conversion" when one feels completely merged with the outside world, when one has completely sunk into nature and become one with it, and when the soul has gone beyond the physical limits of the body to share the omniscience of the Oversoul. In a word, the soul has completely transcended the limits of individuality and become part of the Oversoul. Emerson sees spirit pervading everywhere, not only in the soul of man, but behind nature, throughout nature.
Passage 8
I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear; nor did I wish to practice resignation, unless it was quite necessary. I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life, to cut a broad swath and shave close, to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms, and, if it proved to be mean, why then to get the whole and genuine meanness of it, and publish its meanness to the world; or if it were sublime, to know it by experience, and be able to give a true account of it in my next excursion. For most men, it appears to me, are in a strange uncertainty about it, whether it is of the devil or of God.
1. This passage is taken from a famous work entitled _________ .
2. The author of the work is____________ .
3. List by yourself at least five reasons that the author gives for going to live in the woods.
Answers:
1. Walden
2. Henry David Thoreau
3. Find the answer from the passage.
Passage 10
Tell me not, in mournful numbers.
Life is but an empty dream!
For the soul is dead that slumbers,
And things are not what they seem.
Life is real-life is earnest—
And the grave is not its goal.
Dust thou art, to dust retumest,
Was not spoken of the soul.
1. Who is the writer of these lines?
2. What is the title of the whole poem from which the two stanzas are taken?
3. Summarize the poet’s advice on living.
Answers:
1. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
2. A Psalm of Ufe
3. His optimism which has characterized much of his poetry, also endeared many critics to him. He seemed to have persevered despite tragedy. In his poem, The Psalm of Life, he writes: Life is real! Life is earnest! And the grave is not its goal. This is the cry of the heart, "rallying from depression" , ready to affirm life, to regroup from losses, to push on despite momentary defeat.
Passage 11
Forth into the sunshine which, falling on all alike, seemed, to her sick and morbid heart, as if meant for no other purpose than to reveal the scarlet letter on her breast. Perhaps there was a more real torture in her first unattended footsteps from the threshold of the prison, than even in the procession and spectacle that have been described, where she was made the common infamy, at which all mankind was summoned to point its finger. Then, she was supported by an unnatural tension of the nerves, and by all the combative energy of her character, which enabled her to convert the scene into a kind of lurid triumph.
1. Which novel is this selection taken from?
2. What is the name of the novelist?
3. What are the symbolic meanings of the scarlet letter on Hester's breast?
Answers:
1. The Scarlet Letter Nathaniel Hawthorne
2. adultery, able, angel
Passage 12
It was not very long after speaking the Goney that another homeward-bound whaleman, the Town-Ho, was encountered. She was manned almost wholly by Polynesians. In the short game that ensued she gave us strong news of Moby Dick. To some the general interest in the White Whale was now wildly heightened by a circumstance of the Town-Ho's story, which seemed obscurely to involve with the whale a certain wondrous, inverted visitation of one of those so called judgments of God which at times are said to overtake some men. This latter circumstance, with its own particular accompaniments, forming what may be called the secret part of the tragedy about to be narrated, never reached the ears of Captain Ahab or his mates. For that secret part of the story was unknown to the captain of the Town-Ho himself. It was the private property of three confederate white seamen of that ship, one of whom, it seems, communicated it to Tashtego with Romish injunctions ofsecrecy, but the following night Tashtego rambled in his sleep, and revealed so much of it in that way, that when he was wakened he could not well withhold the rest. Nevertheless, so potent an influence did this thing have on those seamen in the Pequod who came to the full knowledge of it, and by such a strange delicacy, to call it so, were they governed in this matter, that they kept the secret among themselves so that it never transpired abaft the Pequod' s main-mast . Interweaving in its proper place this darker thread with the story as publicly narrated on the ship, the whole of this strange affair I now proceed to put on lasting record.
1. From which novel is this paragraph taken?
2. What is the name of the novelist?
3. Who is Ahab?
4. What is Pequod?
5. What is the theme of the novel?
Answers:
1. Moby Dick
2. Herman Melville
3. The captain of the whaling ship
4. The name of the whaling ship
5. The rebellious struggle of Captain Ahab against the overwhelming, mysterious vastness of the universe and its awesome sometimes merciless forces.
Part IV. The Literature of Realism
Passage 1
I celebrate myself, and sing myself,
And what I assume you shall assume,
For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.
I loafe and invite my soul,
I learn and loafe at my ease observing a spear of summer grass.
1. These are the first two stanzas in the first section of a long poem entitled
2. The name of the poet is___________ .
3. Who is the poet celebrating? Whom do lines 2 ~ 3 also include in the celebration?
4. What is the verse, structure?
5. Take the fifth line as a hint, can you write out the name of the poet’s completed collections of poems?
Answers:
1. Song of Myself
2. Walt Whitman
3. The poet is celebrating himself, his own life. Lines 2-3 also include "you”, the readers and their lives in the celebration.
4. free verse
5. Leaves of Grass
Passage 2
Because I could not stop for Death—
He kindly stopped for me—
The Carriage held but just Ourselves—
Questions:
1. Who is the writer of these lines?
2. In which category would you place this poem?
A. narrative B. dramatic C. lyric
3. Emily Dickinson is noted for her use of_____________ to achieve special effects.
A. perfect rhyme B. exact rhyme C. slant rhyme
Answers:
1. Emily Dickinson
2. C 3. C
Passage 3
It is impossible to conceive of a human creature more wholly desolate and forlorn than Eliza, when she turned her footsteps from Uncle Tom’s cabin.
Questions:
1. This is taken from a famous novel. What is the name of the novel?
2. What is the name of the writer?
3. Who is Uncle Tom?
Answers:
1. Uncle Tom' s Cabin
2. Harriet Beecher Stowe
3. He is the main character in the novel, a suffering slave, a victim of slavery.
Passage 4
Tom Sawyer stepped forward with conceited confidence and soared into the unquenchable and indestructible "Give me liberty or give me death" speech, with fine fury and frantic gesticulation, and broke down in the middle of it. A ghastly stage fright seized him, his legs quaked under him, and he was like to choke. True, he had the manifest sympathy of the house------ but he had the house’s silence, too, which was even worse than its sympathy. The master frowned, and this completed the disaster. Tom struggled awhile and then retired, defeated.
1. Which novel is this passage taken from?
2. Who is the author?
Answers:
1. The Adventures of Tom Sawyer
2. Mark Twain
Passage 5
I took the sack of corn meal and took it to where the canoe was hid, and shoved t, he vines and branches apart and put it in; then I done the same with the side of bacon; then the whisky-jug. I took all the coffee and suga, r there was, and all the ammunition; I took the wadding; I took the bucket and gourd; took a dipper and a tin cup, and my old saw and two blankets, and the skillet and the coffee-pot. I took fish-lines and matches and other things—everything that was worth a cent. I cleaned out the place. I wanted an ax, but there wasn't any, only the one out at the woodpile, and 1 knew why I was going to leave that. I fetched out the gun, and now I was done.
Questions:
1. Which novel is this passage taken from?
2. Analyze the language style of this passage.
Answers
1. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
2. The words used here are, except perhaps "ammunition" which is etymologically French, mostly Anglo-Saxon in origin, and are short, concrete and direct in effect. Sentence structures are most of them simple or compound, with a series of "thens" and "ands" and semi-colons serving as connectives. The repetition of the word "took" and the stringing together of things leave the impression that Mark Twain depended solely on the concrete object and action for the body and move ment of his prose. And what is more, there is an ungrammatical element which gives the final finish to his style. The whole book does approximate the actual speech habit of an uneducated boy from the American South of the mid-nineteenth century.
Passage 6
On his bench in Madison Square, Soapy moved uneasily. When wild geese honk high of nights, and when women without sealskin coats grow kind to their husbands, and when Soapy moves uneasily on his bench in the park, you may know that winter is near at hand.
Questions:
1. This passage is taken from a short story entitled____________ .
2. The author's name is William Sidney Porter. What is his pen name?
Answers:
1. Vie Cop and the Anthem
2. O. Henry
Passage 9
When a girl leaves her home at eighteen, she does one of two things. Either she falls into saving hands and becomes better, or she rapidly assumes the cosmopolitan standard of virtue and becomes worse. Of an intermediate balance, under the circumstances, there is no possibility. The city has its cunning wiles, no less than the infinitely smaller and more human tempter. There are large forces which allure with all the soulfulness of expression possible in the most cultured human. The gleam of a thousand lights is often as effective as the persuasive light in a wooing and fascinating eye. Half the undoing of the unsophisticated and natural mind is accomplished by forces wholly superhuman. A blare of sound, a roar of life, a vast array of human hives, appeal to the astonished senses in equivocal terms. Without a counsellor at hand to whisper cautious interpretations, what falsehoods may not these things breathe into the unguarded ear! Unrecognised for what they are, their beauty, like music, too often relaxes, then weakens then perverts the simpler human perceptions.
1. From which novel is this paragraph taken?
2. Who is the author of this novel?
3. How do you understand "the cosmopolitan standard of virtue"?
4. Is there any naturalist tendency in this passage?
Answers:
1. Sister Carrie
2. Theodore Dreiser
3. "The cosmopolitan standard of virtue" is something that makes a person become low in virtue and value and become worse.
Part V. Twentieth Century Literature (I) Before WWII
Passage 1:
In a Station of the Metro
The apparition of these faces in the crowd;
Petals on a wet, black bough.
Questions:
1. Who is the author of this short poem?
2. What two images are juxtaposed, or placed next to each other in this poem?
3. How do you appreciate this poem?
Answers:
1. Ezra Pound
2. The writer uses the image of "petals" on another image, that is, "wet, black bough".
3. In In a Station of the Metro Pound attempts to produce the emotion he felt when he walked down into a Paris subway station and suddenly saw a number of faces in the dim light. To capture the emotion, Pound uses the image of petals on a wet, black bough. The image is not decoration; It is central to the poem's mean¬ ing. In fact, it is the poem's meaning.
Passage 2:
And he was rich—yes, richer than a king—
And admirably schooled in every grace:
In fine, we thought that he was everything
To make us wish that we were in his place.
So on we worked, and waited for the light,
And went without the meat, and cursed the bread;
And Richard Cory, one calm summer night,
Went home and put a bullet through his head.
Questions:
1. What is the title of the poem?
2. Who wrote this poem?
3. How are the "we" of the poem different from Richard Cory?
4. Do you think the use of the adjective "calm" in the next-to-hist line is an example of verbal irony? What is verbal irony?
5. There is an element of dark humor in the mistaken ideas that the townspeople have of Richard Cory, do you think so?
Answers:
1. Richard Cory
2. Edwin Arlington Robinson
3. The "we" in the poem refers to the poor townspeople who live a hard life and admire the rich. But Richard Cory is the rich person who is admired by the poor, and appears to be calm and smart, but with a heart of suicidal despairing.
4. Yes, it is an example of verbal irony. Verbal irony occurs when words that appear to be saying one thing are really saying something quite different.
Passage 3:
The woods are lovely, dark and deep.
But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep,
And miles to go before 1 sleep.
1. Who wrote this poem?
2. What is the title of this poem?
3. What kind of feeling does this stanza show?
4 What do you think of this poem?
Answers:
1. Robert Frost
2. "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening"
3. It shows a kind of sad, sentimental but also strong and responsible feeling.
4. It is one of the most quietly moving of Frost' s lyrics. On the surface, it seems to be simple, descriptive verses, records of close observation, graphic and homely pictures. It uses the simplest terms and commonest words. But it is deeply meditative, adding far-reaching meanings to the homely music. It uses its superb
craftsmanship to come to a climax of responsibility: the promises to be kept, the obligation to be fulfilled. Few poems have said so much in so little.
Passage 4:
Hog Butcher for the World,
Tool Maker, Stacker of Wheat,
Player with Railroads and the Nation's Freight Handler;
Stormy, husky, brawling,
City of the Big Shoulders:
1. These lines are talking about a big American city which is also the title of the poem. What is it?
2. Who wrote this poem?
3. What is the city called in the first line?
Answers:
1. Chicago
2. Carl Sandburg
3. Hog butcher for the world
Passage 6:
Let us go then, you and I,
When the evening is spread out against the sky
Like a pati ent etherized upon a table;
Let us go, through certain half-deserted streets,
he muttering retreats
Of restless nights in one-night cheap hotels
And sawdust restaurants with oyster-shells
Streets that follow like a tedious argument
Of insidious intent
To lead you to an overwhelming question...
Oh, do not ask, "What is it?"
Let us go and make our visit. In the room the women come and go
Talking of Michelangelo.
1. This is the first 14 lines of a famous poem "The love Song of J. Alfred Pnifrock. “What is the name of the poet wrote it?
2. What image is created in this passage?
3. Do you think Prufrock is a tragic figure? Why?
4. Is this poem a dramatic monologue? Why?
Answers:
1. Thomas Stearns Eliot
2. a patient etherized upon a table
3. He is a tragic figure. The plight of this hesitant, inhabited man, an aging dreamer trapped in decayed, shabby-genteel surroundings, aware of beauty and faced with sordidness, mirrors the plight of the sensitive in the presence of the dull.
4. Yes, it is a dramatic monologue. He is a character created by Eliot, and he speaks directly to us. He tells us his thoughts in leaps and bounds, jumping from one image to another, just as a human mind does.
Passage 8:
The Burial of the Dead
April is the cruellest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire stirring
Duil roots with spring rain.
Winter kept us warm, covering
Earth in forgetful snow, feeding
A little life with dried tubers.
1. This is the first seven lines of a masterpiece poem. What is the name of this masterpiece?
2. Who is the author of this masterpiece?
3. What theme can you get from these lines?
Answers:
1. The Waste Land
2. Thomas Stearns Eliot
3. The theme of the poem is modern spiritual barrenness, the despair and de¬pression that followed the First World War, the sterility and turbulence of the mod¬ern world, and the decline and breakdown of Western culture.
Passage 9:
They were careless people, Tom and Daisy—
They smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness, or whatever it was that kept them together and let other people clean up the mess they had made. . .
1. Which novel is this passage taken from?
2. Who is the writer of this novel?
3. What is the author' s attitude toward such persons as Tom and Daisy?
Answers:
1. The Great Gatsby
2. F. Scott Fitzgerald
3. The author criticized them as selfish, hypocritical persons.
Passage 10:
Poor, poor dear Cat. And this was the price you paid for sleeping together. This was the end of the trap. This was what people got for loving each other. Thank God for gas, anyway. What must it have been like before there were anaesthetics? Once it started, they were in the mill-race. Catherine had a good time in the time of pregnancy. It wasn't bad. She was hardly ever sick. She was not awfully uncomfortable until toward the last. So now they got her in the end. You never got away with anything. Get away hell! It would have been the same if we had been married fifty times. And what if she should die? She won't die. People don't die in childbirth nowadays. That was what all husbands thought. Yes, but what if she should die? She won' t die, She' s just having a bad time. Afterward we’d say what a bad time and Catherine would say it wasn't really so bad. But what if she should die?
1. Which novel is this passage taken from?
2. Who is the writer of this novel from which the passage is selected?
3. What do you think of the language style?
Answers:
1. A Farewell to Arms
2. Ernest Hemingway
3. Hemingway manages to choose words concrete, specific, more commonly found, more casual and conversational. He employs these kinds of words often in a syntax of short, simple sentences, which are orderly and patterned and sometimes ungrammatical.
Passage 11:
The migrant people, scuttling for work, scrabbling to live, looked always for pleasure, dug for pleasure, manufactured pleasure, and they were hungry for amusement. Sometimes amusement lay in speech, and they climbed up their lives with jokes. And it came about in the camps along the road, on the ditch banks beside the streams, under the sycamores, that the story-teller grew into being, so that the people gathered in the low firelight to hear the gifted ones.
1. Which novel is this passage taken from?
2. Who is the writer of this novel?
Answers:
1. The Grapes of Wrath
2. John Steinbeck
Passage 12:
When Miss Emily Grierson died, our whole town went to her funeral; the men through a sort of respectful affectation for a fallen monument, the women mostly out of curiosity to see the inside of her house, which no one save an old manservant—a combined gardener and cook—had seen in at least ten years.
1. Which book is this paragraph taken from?
2. Who is the writer of this book?
V. Analyze Hie main works.
1. Analysis of Robert Frost’s The Road Not Taken.
2. The story summary and the analysis of Chapter 3 of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby.
3. Analysis of John Steinbeck's the Grapes of Wrath.
4. Analysis of William Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury.
Answers:
1. A Rose for Emily
2. William Faulkner下载本文
