GRE Literature in English (REA) (18 page)

This sonnet was written by

1. William Shakespeare.
   
2. John Milton.
   
3. Edmund Spenser.
   
4. Petrarch.
   
5. Thomas Wyatt.
   

All of the following are Miltonian works EXCEPT

1. Areopagitica.
   
2. Paradise Regained.
   
3. Manuductio and Ministerium.
   
4. Il Penseroso.
   
5. Samson Agonistes.
   

If it were done when ‘tis done, then 'twere well
It were done quickly: if the assassination
Could trammel up the consequence, and catch
With his surcease success; that but this blow
Might be the be-all and the end-all here,
But here, upon this bank and shoal of time,
We'd jump the life to come.

 

The character speaking here is contemplating the murder of

1. Caesar.
   
2. Claudius.
   
3. Duncan.
   
4. Cassius.
   
5. Gloucester.
   

That darksome cave they enter, where they find
That cursed man, low sitting on the ground,
Musing full sadly in his sullein mind;
His griesie lockes, long growen, and unbound,
Disordred hong about his shoulder's round, 5
And hid his face; through which his eyne
Lookt deadly dull, and stared as stound;
His raw-bone cheekes through penurie and pine
Were shronke into his jawes, as he did never dine.

The word “pine” in line 8 means

1. pain.
   
2. a mournful look.
   
3. peakedness.
   
4. starvation.
   
5. poverty.
   

The lines were written by

1. Christopher Marlowe.
   
2. Geoffrey Chaucer.
   
3. Sir Philip Sidney.
   
4. Edmund Spenser.
   
5. Thomas Campion.
   

Which is a Quaker spiritual autobiography?

Which is a Puritan chronicle of the Massachusetts Bay Colony?

Which is a Puritan autobiography that recounts the experience of spiritual conversion?

Which is an autobiographical novel written by an escaped slave?

1. Aphra Behn,
   Oroonoko; Or, the Royal Slave
   
2. Harriet Beecher Stowe,
   Uncle Tom's Cabin
   
3. Harriet Jacobs,
   Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl
   
4. Zora Neale Hurston,
   Mules and Men
   
5. Constance Robertson,
   Fire Bell in the Night
   

Which refers to Jonathan Edwards?

1. ... but none can say
   That Lenten fare makes Lenten thought
   Who reads your golden Eastern lay,
   Than which I know no version done
   In English more divinely well;
   A planet equal to the sun
   Which cast it, that large infidel
   Your Omar; and your Omar drew
   Full-handed plaudits from our best
   In modern letters ...
   

2. Others abide our question. Thou art free.
   We ask and ask—Thou smilest and art still,
   Out-topping knowledge. For the loftiest hill,
   Who to the stars uncrowns his majesty.
   

3. O weary Champion of the Cross, lie still:
   Sleep thou at length the all-embracing sleep;
   Long was thy sowing day, rest now and reap:
   Thy fast was long, feast now thy spirit's fill.
   Yea take thy fill of love, because thy will
   Chose love not in the shallows but the deep:
   Thy tides were spring tides, set against the neap
   Of calmer souls: thy flood rebuked their rill.
   

4. What are we in the hands of the great God?
   It was in vain you set up thorn and briar
   In battle array against the fire
   And treason crackling in your blood; ...
   You play against a sickness past your cure.
   How will the hands be strong? How will the heart endure?
   

5. The young Endymion sleeps Endymion's sleep;
   The shepherd-boy whose tale was left half told!
   The solemn grove uplifts its shield of gold
   To the red rising moon, and loud and deep
   The nightingale is singing from the steep ...
   

Skeltonic verse can best be described as

1. undignified, close to doggerel.
   
2. a highly artificial form derived from French models.
   
3. an attempt to emulate the plain but dignified style of the Bible.
   
4. a self-conscious attempt to elevate further the epic style.
   
5. an attempt to capture the natural rhythms of daily speech in verse.
   

All of the following wrote works in which Arthurian legend plays a significant role EXCEPT

1. Thomas Malory.
   
2. John Milton.
   
3. John Dryden.
   
4. Alfred Tennyson.
   
5. Mark Twain.
   

Which is spoken by the narrator of Henry James'
The Beast in the Jungle
?

1. Personally I wouldn't never leave a person shoot a gun in the same boat I was in unless I was sure they knew somethin' about guns. Jim was a sucker to leave a new beginner have his gun, let alone a half-wit. It probably served Jim right, what he got. But still we miss him round here. He certainly was a card.
   

2. One could not stand and watch very long without becoming philosophical, without beginning to deal in symbols and similes, and to hear the hog-squeal of the universe. Was it permitted to believe that there was nowhere upon the earth, or above the earth, a heaven for hogs, where they were requited for all this suffering?
   

3. Philip looked away, as he sometimes looked away from the great pictures where visible forms suddenly became inadequate for the things they have shown to us. He was happy; he was assured that there was greatness in the world. There came to him an earnest desire to be good through the example of this good woman.... Quietly, without hysterical prayers or banging of drums, he underwent conversion. He was saved.
   

4. It was a thing of the merest chance—the turn, as he afterwards felt, of a hair, though he was indeed to live to believe that if light hadn't come to him in this particular fashion it would still have come in another. He was to live to believe this, I say, though he was not to live, I may not less definitely mention, to do much else. We allow him at any rate the benefit of the conviction, struggling up for him at the end, that, whatever might have happened or not happened, he would have come round of himself to the light.
   

5. Description of physical appearance and mannerisms is one of several standard methods of characterization used by writers of fiction. It is also important to “keep the senses operating”; when a detail from one of the five senses, say visual, is “crossed” with a detail from another, say auditory, the reader's imagination is oriented to the scene, perhaps unconsciously.... The brown hair on Ambrose's mother's forearms gleamed in the sun like. Though right handed, she took her left arm from the seat-back to press the dashboard cigar lighter for Uncle Karl.
   

Which satirizes Puritans?

1. Thomas Love Peacock,
   Nightmare Abbey
   
2. T .S. Eliot, “The Waste Land”
   
3. Samuel Butler, “Hudibras”
   
4. John Dryden, “Mac Flecknoe”
   
5. William Wycherley,
   The Country-Wife
   

Frederick Douglass is the author of

1. pastoral poetry.
   
2. a slave narrative.
   
3. the first American novel.
   
4. numerous sermons.
   
5. an early American comedy.
   

Which describes Christopher Marlowe's
Tamburlaine
?

1. A duke (1) poisons his wife because he is enamoured of another married woman (2); the married woman's brother (3) kills his brother and contrives the death of her (2) husband, and also kills their virtuous brother; the married woman (2) is tried for adultery and murder, the duke (1) is poisoned by his dead wife's brother, whose dependents kill the married woman (2) and her brother (3) (who earlier murdered his brother and his brother-in-law).
   

2. The play's hero rises from shepherd to emperor of Persia and supreme ruler of all Asia. He conquers the Turkish emperor, placing him and his empress in a cage and taunting them until they die, vaunts himself in the playwright's “mighty line,” and defeats the Arabian king and the Soldan of Egypt, whose life he spares out of love for the Soldan's captive daughter.
   

3. Pregnant by her brother, the heroine marries one of her suitors. Her brother stabs her to thwart the husband's plan of vengeance, kills the husband, and is himself killed.
   

4. A husband discovers his otherwise “perfect” wife in the arms of a house-guest, and sends her to live in comfort in a remote manor-house, only prohibiting her from seeing him and her children again. The wife dies of remorse after having received forgiveness from her husband on her death-bed.
   

5. The heroine, an orphan, is loved by both of the twin sons of her guardian. She secretly marries one; the other takes his twin's place during an assignation in the dark with the heroine. When the truth is discovered, the brothers kill themselves and the heroine takes poison.
   

One day I wrote her name upon the strand,
But came the waves and washéd it away:
Agayne I wrote it with a second hand,
But came the tyde, and made my paynes his pray.
“Vayne man,” sayd she, “that doest in vaine assay,
A mortall thing so to immortalize,
For I my selve shall lyke to this decay,
And eek my name bee wypéd out lykewize.”
“Not so,” quod I, “let baser things devize
To dy in dust, but you shall live by fame:
My verse your vertues rare shall eternize,
And in the heavens wryte your glorious name.
Where whenas death shall all the world subdew,
Our love shall live, and later life renew.”

The primary theme of the poem is the

1. brevity of life.
   
2. permanence of poetry.
   
3. indifference of nature.
   
4. immortality of true love.
   
5. vanity of human wishes.
   

This poem can best be described as

1. an Italian sonnet.
   
2. an English sonnet.
   
3. a Spenserian sonnet.
   
4. a narrative poem.
   
5. a villanelle.
   

A poem that expresses the same theme is

1. Wyatt's “Whoso List to Hunt.”
   
2. Herrick's “To the Virgins, to Make Much of Time.”
   
3. Surrey's “Alas! So All Things Now Do Hold Their Peace.”
   
4. Raleigh's “What Is Our Life.”
   
5. Shakespeare's Sonnet 55 (“Not marble, nor the gilded monuments”).
   

The king sits in Dumferling toune,
Drinking the blude-reid wine:
“O whar will I get guid sailor,
To sail this schip of mine?”

1. Beowulf
   
2. Sir Gawain and the Green Knight
   
3. Lord Randall
   
4. “Sir Patrick Spens”
   
5. Le Morte D'Arthur
   

A belt of straw and ivy buds,
With coral clasps and amber studs—
And if these pleasures may thee move,
Come live with me and be my love.

1. Sir Philip Sidney
   
2. Andrew Marvell
   
3. Christopher Marlowe
   
4. Robert Herrick
   
5. Lord Byron
   

But we by a love so much refined
That our selves know not what it is,
Inter-assuréd of the mind,
Care less, eyes, lips, and hands to miss.

 

Our two souls therefore, which are one,
Though I must go, endure not yet
A breach, but an expansion,
Like gold to airy thinness beat.

1. Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey
   
2. Thomas Campion
   
3. John Donne
   
4. John Milton
   
5. William Shakespeare
   

‘Twas mercy brought me from my Pagan land,
Taught my benighted soul to understand
That there's a God, that there's a Saviour too:
Once I redemption neither sought nor knew.

1. Anne Bradstreet
   
2. Phillis Wheatley
   
3. Philip Freneau
   
4. Langston Hughes
   
5. Theodore Roethke
   

Hail, horrors! hail,
Infernal world! and thou, profoundest Hell,
Receive thy new possessor: One who brings
A mind not to be changed by place or time.
The mind is its own place, and in itself
Can make a Heaven of Hell, a Hell of Heaven.

1. Edmund Spenser
   
2. John Milton
   
3. John Dryden
   
4. S. T. Coleridge
   
5. Robert Browning