Poetry Exam

Front 1

“The whiskey on your breath

could make a small man dizzy”

Back 1

Roethke

Front 2

“Out of the night that covers me

Black as the pit from pole to pole”

Back 2

Henley

Front 3

“Had he and I but met

By some old ancient inn”

Back 3

Hardy

Front 4

“I know that I shall meet my fate

Somewhere among the clouds above”

Back 4

Yeats

Front 5

“Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,

Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge”

Back 5

Owen

Front 6

“Do not weep maiden, for war is kind.

Because your lover threw wild hands towards the sky”

Back 6

Crane

Front 7

“It was a lover and his lass,

with a hey and a ho and a hey nonino”

Back 7

Shakespeare

Front 8

“The apparition of these faces in the crowd;

Petals on a wet black bow.”

Back 8

Pound

Front 9

“Ah look at all the lonely people,

ah look at all the lonely people”

Back 9

McCartney/The Beatles

Front 10

“The King sits in Dunferline toun,

Drinkin the blude-reid wine”

Back 10

Anonymous

Front 11

“It fell about the Martinmas time,

and a gay time it was then”

Back 11

Anonymous

Front 12

“Mother dear, may I go downtown

Instead of out to play,”

Back 12

Randall

Front 13

“Slim Green went to heaven

St. Peter said Slim”

Back 13

Brown

Front 14

“She even thinks that up in heaven

her class lies late and snores”

Back 14

Cullen

Front 15

“We real cool. We

left school. We”

Back 15

Brooks

Front 16

“O’Melia, my dear, this does everything crown!

Who could have supposed I should meet you in town.”

Back 16

Hardy

Front 17

“There is a certain slant of light,

Winter afternoons”

Back 17

Dickinson

Front 18

“I’m wife—I’ve finished that—

That other state—"

Back 18

Dickinson

Front 19

“Tell all the truth but tell it slant—

success in circuit lies”

Back 19

Dickinson

Front 20

“The difference between poetry

and rhetoric being”

Back 20

Lorde

Front 21

“There is no difference between being raped and being pushed down a flight of cement steps”

Back 21

Piercy

Front 22

“Let us go then, you and I,

When the evening is spread out against the sky”

Back 22

Eliot

Front 23

“In just—

spring when the world is mud…”

Back 23

Cummings

Front 24

“The pennycandystore beyond the El

is where I first”

Back 24

Ferlinghetti

Front 25

“She wanted to be a blade

of grass amid the fields”

Back 25

Giovanni

Front 26

“In the desert

I saw a creature, naked, bestial”

Back 26

Crane

Front 27

“Railroad yard in San Jose

I wandered desolate”

Back 27

Ginsberg

Front 28

“My candle burns at both ends

it will not last the night”

Back 28

Millay

Front 29

“During that summer

when unicorns were still possible;”

Back 29

Tobias

Front 30

“Constantly risking absurdity and death

whenever he performs above the heads”

Back 30

Ferlinghetti

Front 31

“I’m a riddle in nine syllables

an elephant, a ponderous house”

Back 31

Plath

Front 32

“A rock, a river, a tree

hosts to species long since departed”

Back 32

Angelou

Front 33

“Anyone lived in a pretty how town

(with up so floating many bells down)"

Back 33

Cummings

Front 34

“Oceans apart day after day

and I slowly go insane”

Back 34

Marx

Front 35

“O my luves like a red, red rose

that’s newly sprung in june”

Back 35

Burns

Front 36

“Miniver Cheevy, child of scom

grew lean while he assiled”

Back 36

Robinson

Front 37

“They say that Richard Cory

owns one half of this whole town”

Back 37

Simon and Garfunkle

Front 38

“Starry starry night, paint your palette blue and grey

look our on a summer’s day”

Back 38

McLean

Front 39

“To everything (turn, turn, turn)

There is a season (turn, turn, turn)"

Back 39

Seeger

Front 40

“To everything there is a season,

and a time to every purpose under the heaven”

Back 40

Ecclesiastes

Front 41

“So much depends upon

a red wheel barrow”

Back 41

Williams

Front 42

“I chopped down the house that you had been

Saving to live in next summer”

Back 42

Koch

Front 43

“The witch that came (with the withered hag)

to wash the steps with pail and nag”

Back 43

Frost

Front 44

“At little profits that an Idle king

by this still hearth, among these barren crags”

Back 44

Tennyson

Front 45

“May have killed the cat; more likely

the cat was just unlucky, or else curious”

Back 45

Reid

Front 46

“A long long time ago

I can still remember how”

Back 46

McLean

Front 47

“Do not go gentle into that good night

Old age should burn and rave at close of day”

Back 47

Thomas

Front 48

“The trick is to love your days

as if each one may be your last”

Back 48

Meinke

Front 49

“‘Twas brillig and the stithy toves

did gyre and gimble in the wabe;”

Back 49

Carroll

Front 50

“The world is to much with us; late and soon

blahh blahh blahh”

Back 50

Wordsworth

Front 51

“Because I could not stop for death—

He kindly stopped for me”

Back 51

Dickinson

Front 52

“With rue my heart is laden

for golden friends I had”

Back 52

Housman

Front 53

“The time you won your town the race

we chaired you through the market-place”

Back 53

Housman

Front 54

“She dwelt among the untrodden ways

Beside the springs of Dove”

Back 54

Wordsworth

Front 55

“All in green my love went riding

on a great horse of gold”

Back 55

Cummings

Front 56

In Brueghel's great picture, The Kermess,

the dancers go round, they go round and"

Back 56

Williams

Front 57

“I knew a woman, lovely in her bones”

Back 57

Roethke

Front 58

“At 12 years old I started bleeding with the moon

and beating up boys who dreamed of becoming astronauts.”

Back 58

Gibson

Front 59

“What lips my lips have kissed, and where, and why,

I have forgotten, and what arms have lain”

Back 59

Millay

Front 60

“Whenever Richard Cory went down town

we people on the pavement looked at him”

Back 60

Robinson

Front 61

“That’s my last Duchess painted on the wall,

Looking as if she were alive. I call”

Back 61

Browning

Front 62

“Skirting the river road”

Back 62

Whitman

Front 63

“He clasps the crag with crooked hands”

Back 63

Tennyson

Front 64

“What happens to a dream deferred?”

Back 64

Hughes

Front 65

“Well son, I’ll tell you

Life for me ain’t been no crystal stair”

Back 65

Hughes

Front 66

“The fog comes

on little cat feet”

Back 66

Sandburg

Front 67

“Thou still unravish'd bride of quietness,

Thou foster-child of silence and slow time,”

Back 67

Keats

Front 68

“Sundays too my father got up early”

Back 68

Hayden

Front 69

“I wondered lonely as a cloud”

Back 69

Wordsworth

Front 70

“They eat beans mostly,

this old yellow pair”

Back 70

Brooks

Front 71

“I walk down the garden paths

and all the daffodils”

Back 71

Lowell

Front 72

“The sea is calm tonight

the tide is full”

Back 72

Arnold

Front 73

“So there stood Matthew Arnold and this girl”

Back 73

Hecht

Front 74

“Now as I was young and easy

under the apple boughs”

Back 74

Thomas

Front 75

“In Xanadu did Kubla Khan”

Back 75

Coleridge

Front 76

“Greatly shining,

the autumn moon floats in the thin sky”

Back 76

Lowell

Front 77

“Aunt Jennifer’s tigers dance across a screen”

Back 77

Rich

Front 78

“Razors pain you

rivers are damp”

Back 78

Parker

Front 79

“When I was one- and twenty”

Back 79

Housman

Front 80

“He was found by the Bureau of Statistics to be”

Back 80

Auden

Front 81

“Had we but world enough and time

this coyness, lady, were no crime”

Back 81

Marvell

Front 82

“Love is not all:

it is not meat nor drink”

Back 82

Millay