GRE Literature in English (REA) (32 page)

The tableau chiefly suggests

1. that Miss Emily was an abused child.
   
2. the social pretentiousness of Emily's family.
   
3. the domineering and overly protective nature of Emily's father.
   
4. Miss Emily's purity and her father's stern morality.
   
5. that the Griersons successfully protected themselves from the ravages of passing time.
   

The author of this passage is

1. Katherine Anne Porter.
   
2. Stephen Crane.
   
3. Eudora Welty.
   
4. Flannery O'Connor.
   
5. William Faulkner.
   

The soote season, that bud and bloom forth brings,
With green hath clad the hill and eke the vale;
The nightingale with feathers new she sings;
The turtle to her make hath told her tale.
Summer is come, for every spray now springs;
The hart hath hung his old head on the pale;
The buck in brake his winter coat he flings,
The fishes float with new repaired scale;
The adder all her slough away she slings,
The swift swallow pursueth the fliés small;
The busy bee her honey now she mings.
Winter is worn, that was the flowers' bale.
And thus I see among these pleasant things,
Each care decays, and yet my sorrow springs.

 

This sonnet, like those of many other Renaissance poets, draws its inspiration from the poetry of

1. Sappho.
   
2. Ovid.
   
3. Tasso.
   
4. Petrarch.
   
5. Homer.
   

Margaret greeted her lord with peculiar tenderness on the morrow. Mature as he was, she might yet be able to help him to the building of the rainbow bridge that should connect the prose in us with the passion. Without it we are meaningless fragments, half monks, half beasts, unconnected arches that have never joined into a man. With it love is born, and alights on the highest curve, glowing against the grey, sober against the fire. Happy the man who sees from either aspect the glory of these outspread wings. The roads of his soul lie clear, and he and his friends shall find easy going.

It was hard going in the roads of Mr. Wilcox's soul. From boyhood on he had neglected them. “I am not a man who bothers about my own inside,” Outwardly he was cheerful, reliable, and brave; but within, all had reverted to chaos, ruled so far as it was ruled at all, by an incomplete asceticism. Whether as a boy, husband, widower, he had always the sneaking belief that bodily passion is bad, a belief that is desirable only when held passionately. Religion had confirmed him. The words that were read aloud on Sunday to him and to other respectable men were the words that had once kindled the souls of St. Catherine and St. Francis into a white-hot hatred of the carnal. He could not be as the saint and love the Infinite with a seraphic ardour, but he could be a little ashamed of loving a wife.

In the first paragraph, “prose” can best be said to be associated with

1. monks and beasts.
   
2. monks and grey.
   
3. passion and fire.
   
4. grey and fire.
   
5. beasts and grey.
   

According to the narrator, Mr. Wilcox's greatest fault is

1. the chaotic nature of his inner life.
   
2. an inadequate education.
   
3. his lack of religious convictions.
   
4. his willingness to marry without loving his wife.
   
5. his occasional lapses from cheerfulness, reliability, and courage.
   

Which of the following statements best expresses the narrator's attitude toward carnality?

1. Sexual desire is incompatible with marital love.
   
2. Sexual desire necessarily leads to guilt or shame.
   
3. If man cannot attain a “white-hot hatred of the carnal,” he should at least strive for an incomplete asceticism.
   
4. Absolute hatred of sexual desire is preferable to an incomplete asceticism.
   
5. Spiritual wholeness is possible only when bodily passion is suppressed.
   

Which describes Aristophanes'
Lysistrata
?

Which describes Sophocles'
Antigone
?

Which describes Molière's
Tartuffe
?

Which describes Euripides'
Medea
?

1. Forced to choose between loyalty to family and loyalty to a new king, who is also her uncle, the heroine chooses the former and duty to what she calls the laws of the gods rather than the laws of the state.
   

2. This play satirizes both religious hypocrisy and fraudulence, and also makes fun of the obsessive fanaticism and gullibility of those who allow themselves to be victimized by the greedy and self-serving.
   

3. The heroine decides to leave her husband and to achieve self-realization after she discovers that his position in society is more important to him than her love and their mutual respect.
   

4. This play asks its audience to make love not war. The women of the play try to bring an end to a war that threatens their city by refusing to have sexual relations with their men as long as the latter continue the war.
   

5. Deserted by her husband for another woman, the protagonist seeks revenge by killing their two children and the “other woman.”
   

This is the excellent foppery of the world, that when
we are sick in fortune—
often the surfeits of our own behavior—we make
guilty of our disasters the sun,
the moon, and stars, as if we were villains on
necessity, fools by heavenly
compulsion, knaves, thieves, and treachers
by spherical predominance, drunkards,
liars, and adulterers by an enforc'd obedience
of planetary influence, and all that
we are evil in, by a divine thrusting on. An
admirable evasion of whoremaster
man, to lay his goatish disposition on the charge
of a star! My father compounded
with my mother under the Dragon's Tail, and my
nativity was under Ursa Major, so that
it follows I am rought and lecherous. Fut, I should
have been that I am, had the
maidenliest star in the firmament twinkled on my
bastardizing.

“Foppery” (line 1) can best be understood to mean

1. finery.
   
2. appearance.
   
3. habit.
   
4. condition.
   
5. foolishness.
   

“Goatish” (line 7) means

1. sluggish.
   
2. irrational.
   
3. lecherous.
   
4. fickle.
   
5. irresponsible.
   

Which of the following statements is LEAST accurate? The speaker

1. believes man shapes his own character.
   
2. believes man tries to blame his mistakes on something other than himself.
   
3. has little or no belief in Providence.
   
4. believes in astrological determinism.
   
5. believes that man's misfortunes are often the result of his own excessive behavior.
   

I am poor brother Lippo, by your leave!
You need not clap your torches to my face.
Zooks, what's to blame? you think you see a monk!
What 't is past midnight, and you go the rounds,
And here you catch me at an alley's end
Where sportive ladies leave their doors ajar?
The Carmine's my cloister: hunt it up,
Do,—harry out, if you must show your zeal,
Whatever rat, there, haps on his wrong hole,
And nip each softling of a wee white mouse,
Weke, weke,
that's crept to keep him company!
Aha, you know your betters! Then, you'll take
Your hand away that's fiddling on my throat,
And please to know me likewise. Who am I?
Why, one, sir, who is lodging with a friend
Three streets off—he's a certain ... how d' ye call?
Master—a ... Cosimo of the Medici,
I' the house that caps the corner. Boh! you were best!
Remember and tell me, the day you're hanged,
How you affected such a gullet's-gripe!
But you, sir, it concerns you that your knaves
Pick up a manner nor discredit you: ...

The poem is set in

1. medieval Rome.
   
2. early Renaissance Florence.
   
3. medieval Spain.
   
4. early Renaissance Naples.
   
5. nineteenth-century Milan.
   

The opening scene takes place after midnight in an area

1. infested by rats.
   
2. adjacent to the Carmelite cloister where Lippo Lippi lives.
   
3. in the city's main business district.
   
4. in front of the Medici palace.
   
5. that contains houses of prostitution.
   

To whom is Lippo Lippi speaking when he says “Boh! you were best?”

1. The policeman (or watchman) who handled him most roughly
   
2. The most aggressive of the ruffians or thieves who have accosted him
   
3. The officer in charge of the police patrol
   
4. The leader of the ruffians
   
5. The respectable-looking friend who has rescued him
   

What causes the men who have stopped him to treat him more gently?

1. They feel compassion for his situation.
   
2. The effectiveness of his rhetorical self-defense
   
3. The arrival of his friend
   
4. His mention of his connection to the Medici
   
5. He has embarrassed them by stressing his weakness and their greatly superior strength.
   

To whom is Lippo Lippi speaking in line 21 (“But you, sir”)?

1. The policeman who handled him most roughly
   
2. The most aggressive of the ruffians
   
3. The officer in charge of the police patrol
   
4. The leader of the ruffians
   
5. The respectable-looking friend who has rescued him
   

Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?
Thou art more lovely and more temperate:
Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,
And summer's lease hath all too short a date;
Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines,
And often is his gold complexion dimm'd;
And every fair from fair sometimes declines,
By chance or nature's changing course untrimm'd:
But thy eternal summer shall not fade
Nor lose possession of that fair thou ow‘st;
Nor shall Death brag thou wand'rest in his shade,
When in eternal lines to time thou grow'st;
So long as men can breathe or eyes can see,
So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.

According to the speaker, death will be unable to “brag thou wand'rest in his shade” because

1. the beloved is like summer, which returns each year.
   
2. the beloved is like summer, which is sunny, not shady.
   
3. death releases the beloved into eternal life.
   
4. the beloved, partaking of the earth's natural cycles, will be remembered each summer.
   
5. the beloved derives life from this poem for as long as it is read.
   

The greatest shift in thought process in the poem occurs at the beginning of line

1. 3.
   
2. 5.
   
3. 9.
   
4. 11.
   
5. 13.
   

The primary theme of the poem is

1. the permanence of poetry.
   
2. the beauty of the beloved.
   
3. the disappointments of summer.
   
4. the unreliability of nature.
   
5. the impermanence of love.
   

Proud of their weakness, however, they must always be protected, guarded from care, and all the rough toils that dignify the mind.—If this be the fiat of fate, if they will make themselves insignificant and contemptible, sweetly to waste “life away,” let them not expect to be valued when their beauty fades, for it is the fate of the fairest flowers to be admired and pulled to pieces by the careless hand that plucked them. In how many ways do I wish, from the purest benevolence, to impress this truth on my sex ; yet I fear that they will not listen to a truth that dear bought experience has brought home to many an agitated bosom, nor willingly resign the privileges of rank and sex for the privileges of humanity, to which those have no claim who do not discharge its duties.

Which of the following statements best expresses the “truth” the author wishes to impress upon her sex?

1. Women must subordinate household pursuits to careers to achieve full humanity.
   
2. Women must preserve their beauty as long as possible because they lose their power when it fades.
   
3. Men are the natural antagonists of women; hence, women must substitute reasoned judgment for naive trust.
   
4. To achieve full humanity, women must be willing to give up the arbitrary power of beauty.
   
5. Women face more natural obstacles than men; hence, they must not allow socially-conditioned roles to add to those obstacles.