AP English Literature: Poetry, Fiction & Drama

Two AP English courses, two exams. This course prepares for AP English Literature and Composition, which reads poems, fiction and plays and asks for an interpretation of a text. The catalogue's other AP English course, AP English Language: Rhetoric and Nonfiction (ENG 120), prepares for the Language exam, whose passages are nonfiction and whose essays analyse rhetoric, argue a position and synthesise sources. Most schools take Language in the eleventh grade and Literature in the twelfth; if you have done that course, the habit of reading for the choices a writer made is the one you bring here.

One sentence, one question, before anything else

Here is the first sentence of a story published in Dublin in 1914. Read it, then answer the question underneath before you read another word of this lesson.

She sat at the window watching the evening invade the avenue.

In context, the word "invade" chiefly serves to

• (A) establish that the story is set during a period of open warfare in the city
• (B) suggest that the falling darkness is hostile and cannot be kept out
• (C) emphasise how quickly the sun goes down in Dublin during the winter months
• (D) indicate that the woman at the window is an unusually careless observer

The answer is B, and it is worth slowing down over. Nothing in the sentence is about war, so A invents a plot the passage does not have. Nothing is about speed, so C answers a question nobody asked. D passes judgement on the woman with no evidence at all. What is left is the verb. James Joyce could have written that she watched the evening fall, settle, gather, or come down the avenue. He picked a verb that armies do. The evening is not arriving. It is taking ground. And she is sitting still while it does.

Key idea: A question about a single word is nearly always a question about the words the writer did not choose.

What is actually in the exam

Three hours, two sections, and no surprises about the shape of either. The College Board publishes the format, so there is no reason to walk in guessing at it.

Of the five passage sets in Section I, at least two are poems and at least two are prose fiction; a passage from a play can appear in place of a fiction passage. The passages are not identified. You will not be told the author, the title, or the year, and you do not need them. Everything the questions ask about is on the page in front of you.

Five sets in sixty minutes works out to about eleven minutes each, and that includes reading the passage. Nothing is subtracted for a wrong answer, which has been true since 2011, so an unanswered question is simply a question you have decided to get wrong. Leave nothing blank.

Remember: Eleven minutes per passage, no guessing penalty, no titles or authors given, and 45 percent of the grade riding on it.

The passage

The story is Eveline, from Joyce's collection Dubliners. A young woman in a Dublin house has agreed to leave that night with a sailor named Frank. Here is how it opens, with the paragraph breaks Joyce gave it.

She sat at the window watching the evening invade the avenue. Her head was leaned against the window curtains and in her nostrils was the odour of dusty cretonne. She was tired.

Few people passed. The man out of the last house passed on his way home; she heard his footsteps clacking along the concrete pavement and afterwards crunching on the cinder path before the new red houses. One time there used to be a field there in which they used to play every evening with other people's children. ... The children of the avenue used to play together in that field, the Devines, the Waters, the Dunns, little Keogh the cripple, she and her brothers and sisters. ... Still they seemed to have been rather happy then. Her father was not so bad then; and besides, her mother was alive. That was a long time ago; she and her brothers and sisters were all grown up; her mother was dead. Tizzie Dunn was dead, too, and the Waters had gone back to England. Everything changes. Now she was going to go away like the others, to leave her home.

Home! She looked round the room, reviewing all its familiar objects which she had dusted once a week for so many years, wondering where on earth all the dust came from.

Read it once at ordinary speed before you go on. Resist the urge to annotate. On the exam the first read is for understanding what is happening to whom; the pencil comes out on the second pass, when a question sends you back to a specific line.

Seven questions, worked

1. The detail of the "dusty cretonne" primarily serves to (A) identify Eveline's social class precisely; (B) tie her physical surroundings to the tiredness stated in the next sentence; (C) suggest that the family cannot afford new furniture; (D) foreshadow the arrival of a visitor to the house.

B. Cretonne is a cheap printed cotton used for curtains and chair covers, so C is not wrong about the world of the story. But the question asks what the detail does here, and here it sits between her head leaning on the curtain and the flat sentence "She was tired." Dust settles on things nobody moves.

2. The description of the man's footsteps "clacking" and then "crunching" chiefly emphasises (A) Eveline's alertness to sound while she sits motionless; (B) the poverty of the neighbourhood in which the story is set; (C) the passage of time between two separate evenings; (D) the danger the man represents to the woman at the window.

A. Two verbs, two surfaces, one listener who does not get up. Notice that the question says "chiefly". Several options may be defensible; only one is what the detail is mainly doing.

3. In the second paragraph, the sentence "Everything changes" is best understood as (A) the narrator correcting Eveline's mistaken view; (B) a proverb quoted by Eveline's father earlier in her life; (C) Eveline's own thought, rendered in the narrator's third person; (D) a direct address by the author to the reader.

C. This is a question about narration disguised as a question about a sentence. Everything around it is Eveline's memory, in her order, at her level of vocabulary, yet the pronoun is "she" and not "I". That mixture has a name, and you will meet it again in this course: free indirect speech, a third-person narration that borrows a character's voice without quotation marks.

4. The single-word paragraph opening "Home!" most nearly conveys (A) relief at the safety of the house; (B) a bitter recognition of what she is about to give up; (C) a neighbour calling to her from the street; (D) the narrator's contempt for domestic life.

B. The word arrives immediately after "to leave her home", so it is Eveline turning the word over. What follows is not comfort. It is dust she has wiped weekly for years and a photograph of a priest whose name she never learned. The exclamation mark is doing the work of a whole paragraph of feeling.

5. The listing of "the Devines, the Waters, the Dunns, little Keogh the cripple" chiefly serves to (A) introduce characters who will act later in the story; (B) demonstrate the narrator's exhaustive knowledge of Dublin; (C) supply a comic contrast with the sadness of the opening; (D) give her remembered childhood a specific, populated texture.

D. The names are never used again. That is exactly the point: memory keeps particular names long after the people are gone, and two sentences later the list is answered by another list, of who is dead and who has left.

6. The word "seemed" in "Still they seemed to have been rather happy then" chiefly functions to (A) mark the happiness as remembered rather than certain; (B) show that Eveline is deliberately lying to herself about her father; (C) indicate that the narrator disagrees with Eveline's account; (D) establish that the family was in fact unhappy at the time.

A. Watch the difference between A and D. "Seemed" withholds certainty; it does not supply the opposite certainty. The exam loves this gap. An option that overstates a hedge into a denial is a distractor, not an answer.

7. The tone of the passage as a whole is best described as (A) mournful and bitter; (B) detached and clinical; (C) quiet and weighted with loss; (D) hopeful about the journey ahead.

C. Test the adjectives against the sentences. "Bitter" is too hot for prose this flat. "Clinical" is too cold for "Still they seemed to have been rather happy then." "Hopeful" contradicts a paragraph in which four people are dead or gone. Tone questions are answered by degree, not by category, and the winning option is usually the one that gets the temperature right.

The point: Every one of those answers was settled by rereading four or five words, not by knowing anything about Joyce.

Four question types, and where the answer lives

The most expensive error on this section is over-inference. An inference question asks for the next step, not the third one. If your reasoning needs a sentence beginning "she must have felt", you have walked past the answer.

Three tests that kill a wrong option

First: is it in the passage? A great deal of what students choose is true of the world and absent from the text. Nothing in the opening says the family is poor, though a reader who knows Dublin in 1914 might assume it.

Second: is it too strong? Options containing always, never, entirely, completely, or refuses are wrong far more often than chance, because literary passages rarely commit that hard. "Seemed" is not "was not".

Third: is it too big? An option stating the theme of the whole story is usually wrong about eight lines. Match the size of the claim to the size of the question.

Apply all three and most sets collapse to a choice between two options. Then reread the exact words the question quotes; the difference is nearly always a single word.

What matters here: You are not looking for a good answer. You are looking for the one answer the other three cannot survive next to.

How to spend the hour

Read the whole passage first, once, at the speed you would read a story. A poem gets read twice, because a poem's first sentence often does not resolve until its last.

Then work the set in order. The questions usually follow the order of the passage, so answering them in sequence keeps you moving through the text instead of jumping around it. Mark the two that need a second look and return after finishing the set.

Watch the clock at the set level, not the question level. If a set took thirteen minutes, take the next at ten. Leaving a whole passage unread costs eight to thirteen questions; a rushed guess costs one.

Common misconceptions

• The passage is background, and the questions are the real task. Every answer is in the passage, so skimming it is skipping the answer key.
• The best answer is the one that sounds most literary. An option full of impressive words is a favourite distractor; test it against the lines, not against your ear.
• If two options both look right, the question is broken. One of them is right about the passage and the other is right about life. That is the design.
• You lose marks for guessing. You have not since 2011. An empty answer scores zero with certainty.
• You need to recognise the author. Passages are unidentified on purpose, and recognising one has never earned a point.

Where this leaves us

• Section I is 55 questions in five sets, sixty minutes, 45 percent of the score.
• A word-choice question is really a question about the rejected alternatives.
• Inference means one step from a stated detail, not three.
• Tone is settled by degree: right temperature, not right category.
• Kill options that are absent from the passage, too strong for it, or too large for the question.
• In short: read the passage before the options, and let the four words the question quotes decide it.

Sources

1. Joyce, J. (1914). Dubliners. Grant Richards. Full text at Project Gutenberg, gutenberg.org.
2. College Board. (2019). AP English Literature and Composition: Course and exam description. College Board. Course home page at apcentral.collegeboard.org.
3. Eveline (short story). (n.d.). In Wikipedia. en.wikipedia.org.
4. Arp, T. R., & Johnson, G. (2018). Perrine's Literature: Structure, Sound, and Sense (13th ed.). Cengage Learning.

What each question hands you

Question 1 gives you a poem you have never seen. Question 2 gives you a passage of fiction you have never seen. Question 3 gives you two sentences of prompt and no text at all: the work has to come out of your own head, with whatever you can quote or describe from memory.

Two hours for all three. The suggested split is forty minutes each, and the scoring is identical across them.

The point: Two of the three essays need no prior reading at all. The third needs one novel or play you know to the level of specific scenes.

Six points, three separate decisions

Each essay is scored out of six, and the six are not spread evenly. One point is for the thesis. Four are for evidence and commentary. One is for sophistication. A reader makes those three decisions in that order, and the middle one is where essays are won and lost.

Read Row B carefully, because the language is exact. One point goes to an essay with general evidence and commentary that is mostly summary. Two goes to one with some specific evidence and some explanation. Three goes to one where every claim has specific evidence and some of it is explained. Four asks for something harder: commentary that consistently explains how the evidence supports a line of reasoning, and an account of how more than one technique contributes to meaning.

That word "consistently" is why so many capable essays stall at three. Quoting is easy; explaining every quotation is not.

Remember: The thesis is one point. The explaining is four. Nobody passes this exam on thesis statements.

Question 1, worked: a poem by Robert Frost

Here is the poem, published in 1916. Frost's dash in the third-from-last line is set below as a plain hyphen.

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;

Then took the other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim,
Because it was grassy and wanted wear;
Though as for that the passing there
Had worn them really about the same,

And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back.

I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I -
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.

The prompt would read something like this: Read the poem carefully. Then, in a well-written essay, analyse how the speaker's account of his choice conveys his attitude toward it. Do not merely summarise the poem.

Now the trap. Most readers arrive at The Road Not Taken knowing its last two lines and nothing else, and write that the poem celebrates independence. Go back to stanza two. The other road had "perhaps the better claim, Because it was grassy and wanted wear" and then, immediately, "Though as for that the passing there Had worn them really about the same." Stanza three says both lay equally in untrodden leaves. The speaker says three times, in three different ways, that the roads were indistinguishable.

So what is the last stanza? It is in the future tense. "I shall be telling this with a sigh Somewhere ages and ages hence." He is predicting the story he will eventually tell about a choice he has just admitted was not a choice at all. The poem is not about taking the less travelled road; it is about how we will later claim we did.

Watch what that does to a thesis.

• Not defensible, because the poem contradicts it: Frost shows that choosing the unconventional path makes all the difference in a person's life.
• Not a thesis, because nobody could disagree: In this poem Frost uses imagery, diction and structure to describe a man choosing between two roads.
• Defensible: By insisting in three separate stanzas that the two roads were identical and then placing his famous claim of difference in the future tense, the speaker exposes his own attitude as rueful self-knowledge: he already knows he will turn an arbitrary choice into a story about character.

A paragraph of Row B work on that thesis would run: the hedge "perhaps", the concessive "Though as for that", and the flat adverb "really" in "worn them really about the same" all retract the distinction the speaker has just drawn. None of them is a decorative word. Each one takes something back. Then the commentary: a speaker who keeps correcting his own preference is not describing a decision, he is rehearsing an excuse, and the sigh in line 16 tells us he knows it.

What matters here: A thesis that any reader of the last two lines could have written is not worth a point. Go where the poem argues with itself.

Question 2, worked: the opening of Pride and Prejudice

Now a prose passage. Jane Austen opens Pride and Prejudice in 1813 with a sentence and then gets out of the way.

It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife.

"My dear Mr. Bennet," said his lady to him one day, "have you heard that Netherfield Park is let at last?"

Mr. Bennet replied that he had not.

"But it is," returned she; "for Mrs. Long has just been here, and she told me all about it."

Mr. Bennet made no answer.

"Do not you want to know who has taken it?" cried his wife, impatiently.

"You want to tell me, and I have no objection to hearing it."

The prompt: analyse how Austen uses literary techniques to characterise the relationship between Mr. and Mrs. Bennet.

Count the lines. She gets three speeches in a row; he answers twice, and one of those answers is reported rather than quoted. The narrator does not tell us he is withholding. The layout of the page tells us.

Then look at the verbs attached to her: "said", "returned", "cried". Hers escalate. His do not exist, because his speech needs no reporting verb at all by the second exchange. And his one full sentence, "You want to tell me, and I have no objection to hearing it", does two things at once: it grants her what she wants and withholds the interest she wanted with it.

A defensible thesis: Austen establishes the Bennet marriage as an unequal comic partnership by giving Mrs. Bennet the volume and Mr. Bennet the timing, so that his pauses and flat concessions take the energy out of her news without ever refusing her.

Notice that the thesis names what the techniques are doing rather than listing their names. "Austen uses dialogue, diction and irony" is the essay that earns one point in Row B. "His pauses take the energy out of her news" is the essay that can earn four, because it gives the commentary something to prove.

Question 3: the open question, with no passage

Q3 looks like this: In many works of literature, a character must choose between two loyalties that cannot both be honoured. Either from your own reading or from the list below, choose a work of fiction or drama in which a character faces such a choice. Then, in a well-written essay, analyse how that choice contributes to an interpretation of the work as a whole.

The list is a courtesy, not a requirement. Any work of literary merit is allowed, which in practice means a novel or play that rewards analysis rather than one that simply has a plot.

The phrase that decides the score is "an interpretation of the work as a whole". Not the scene. Not the character. The whole. So the shape of a Q3 thesis is always: because this character chooses X over Y, the work ends up arguing Z.

Try it on a play you may already know. In Hamlet, the prince is asked to avenge his father and cannot do it while he is still the kind of person who needs to be certain first. A thesis: Hamlet's repeated refusal to act on the ghost's command until he has independent proof turns the play's revenge plot into an argument about the cost of conscience, since every delay that keeps him honest also kills someone else.

Without a passage in front of you, your evidence is specific reference: the play within the play, the prayer scene where he stands behind Claudius and does not strike, the closet scene. You cannot quote at length from memory and you are not expected to. You are expected to be exact about what happens and where.

In short: Q3 is the only question where you choose the text, which means it is the only one you can prepare for in advance.

Common misconceptions

• A longer essay scores higher. Row B rewards explained evidence, not volume. A tight three-paragraph essay that explains every quotation beats five paragraphs of quotation with no commentary.
• You need an introduction and a conclusion. You need a thesis. A forty-minute essay that spends six of those minutes on a warm-up paragraph has bought nothing.
• Naming devices earns points. Identifying a simile earns nothing. Explaining what that simile does to the reader's sense of the speaker is the point being scored.
• Q3 requires a book from the list. The list is a prompt for your memory; any work of literary merit qualifies.

Putting it together

• Q1 and Q2 supply their own text; Q3 supplies only a prompt.
• Six points per essay: one thesis, four evidence and commentary, one sophistication.
• The fourth Row B point turns on "consistently", which means every piece of evidence gets explained.
• A defensible thesis is one a careful reader could argue against, and the text can settle.
• Q1's poem may argue with itself, as Frost's does; that quarrel is where the thesis lives.
• The upshot: name what a technique does, never what it is called.

Sources

1. Frost, R. (1916). The road not taken. In Mountain Interval. Henry Holt. Text at the Academy of American Poets, poets.org.
2. Austen, J. (1813). Pride and Prejudice. T. Egerton. Full text at Project Gutenberg, gutenberg.org.
3. College Board. (2019). AP English Literature and Composition: Course and exam description (pp. 171-190, free-response scoring rubrics). College Board.
4. Foster, T. C. (2014). How to Read Literature Like a Professor (Rev. ed.). Harper Perennial.

Two versions of the same four lines

In 1890, four years after Emily Dickinson died, Mabel Loomis Todd and Thomas Wentworth Higginson published a selection of the poems found in her bedroom. Here is how their book printed one of them.

There's a certain slant of light,
On winter afternoons,
That oppresses, like the weight
Of cathedral tunes.

And here is what Dickinson actually wrote, restored by Thomas H. Johnson in 1955 from the manuscripts. Her dashes are set below as plain hyphens.

There's a certain Slant of light,
Winter Afternoons -
That oppresses, like the Heft
Of Cathedral Tunes -

Three changes. The editors added the word "On". They replaced "Heft" with "weight". They swapped her dash for a line of ordinary punctuation. Each looks like tidying. Each removes something the poem was doing, and working out what is the whole business of close reading.

Key idea: Close reading is the habit of noticing what a word does that its nearest synonym would not.

The poem

There's a certain Slant of light,
Winter Afternoons -
That oppresses, like the Heft
Of Cathedral Tunes -

Heavenly Hurt, it gives us -
We can find no scar,
But internal difference,
Where the Meanings, are -

None may teach it - Any -
'Tis the Seal Despair -
An imperial affliction
Sent us of the Air -

When it comes, the Landscape listens -
Shadows - hold their breath -
When it goes, 'tis like the Distance
On the look of Death -

Sixteen lines, and no story at all. Nothing happens except a change in the light. Read it twice before going on, once for sense and once aloud.

Stanza one: certain, Slant, Heft

Start with "certain". It means "a particular one", the way you would say a certain person telephoned. It also means sure, settled, not in doubt. Dickinson is describing a specific angle of light and, in the same syllable, something inevitable. Neither meaning cancels the other, and a poem is allowed to keep both.

"Slant" is the physical fact: in a northern winter the sun never climbs high, so the light comes in sideways through a window and lies along the floor. It is also the word Dickinson uses elsewhere for oblique truth-telling. The light arrives at an angle, and so does the poem.

Now the editors' word. "Weight" is what a thing has. "Heft" is what you feel when you lift a thing to test it: heft is weight plus a hand. So the manuscript line makes the reader an active party. The poem is not saying the light is heavy; it is saying you can feel how heavy it is, the way you weigh a stone in your palm before throwing it.

And "Winter Afternoons" without "On" is not the same phrase as "On winter afternoons". Without the preposition, the words sit in apposition to the light itself, as if to say: this slant, these afternoons, one thing. The editors turned an identity into a schedule.

Two more. "Oppresses" carries physical pressure and political tyranny at once, which the third stanza will pick up in "imperial". And "Cathedral Tunes" gives sound a weight, which is the sort of crossing between senses that will matter again: you cannot literally heft a hymn.

Worth holding on to: Ask of every important word, what is the nearest word the poet refused, and what did refusing it buy?

Stanza two: an injury with no scar

"Heavenly Hurt, it gives us" puts two H sounds together and two opposite ideas: the wound comes from heaven. If the hurt is heavenly then the source of pain and the source of comfort are the same address, which is a harder thought than it looks.

"We can find no scar" is the test a doctor would run, and it fails. Nothing on the skin. Then the syntax does something odd: "But internal difference, / Where the Meanings, are -". Read that comma before "are". It stops the sentence a beat short of its verb, so the line arrives at "are" like a step taken in the dark.

And notice where the damage is. Not in the body, not even in the feelings, but "Where the Meanings are". What the light injures is the place where things mean things. That is a far stranger claim than sadness, and it is the reason this poem is not simply about winter gloom.

Stanza three: the seal and the empire

"None may teach it - Any -" is compressed almost to breaking. Untangled, it reads: nobody can teach this to anybody. The 1890 editors printed "None may teach it anything", which turns the light into a pupil and loses the point, which is that the experience cannot be passed on.

"'Tis the Seal Despair" uses a word from officialdom. A seal is wax pressed onto a document to prove who sent it. So the despair is not weather; it is stamped, authorised, delivered. "An imperial affliction / Sent us of the Air" completes the picture: an empire has issued a decree, and the postal service is the sky.

That sequence is worth pausing on, because it is how imagery works in a good poem. Oppresses, Seal, imperial, Sent: four words from the vocabulary of power, spread across three stanzas, quietly agreeing with one another. No single one of them would carry the idea alone.

Why this matters: Imagery is rarely one striking picture. It is usually a set of words from the same world, placed far enough apart that you feel the pattern before you notice it.

The turn

Line 13 is where the poem changes direction, and every poem worth reading has such a moment. In a sonnet it has a name, the volta; here it simply happens.

For twelve lines the poem has been inside a person: what the light gives us, what we cannot find, what none may teach. Then: "When it comes, the Landscape listens - / Shadows - hold their breath -". The camera pulls back. Now it is the world that reacts, and the world reacts the way a frightened person does, by going still and holding its breath. That is personification doing real work rather than decorating: the inner state has been pushed outward onto the fields until you cannot say whether the landscape is afraid or the speaker is.

Look at where the dashes fall: "Shadows - hold their breath -". The punctuation makes you stop between the subject and its verb, so the line does the holding it describes. Todd and Higginson printed "Shadows hold their breath;" and the effect is gone.

Then the last two lines. "When it goes, 'tis like the Distance / On the look of Death -". Not the look of death, but the distance on it. Anyone who has seen a dead face knows what she means: the features are all still there and the person is not. The poem, which began at a window, ends on a face, and the departure of the light is compared to the departure of a person from their own expression.

The core of it: The turn is not a change of subject. It is a change in who is doing the feeling.

Sound: a hymn that will not quite rhyme

Dickinson built most of her poems on the hymn stanza, alternating longer and shorter lines in the metre of the Protestant hymnal. That is the tune a New England congregation had in its ears, which is exactly why "Cathedral Tunes" is in the third line: the poem is written in the shape of the thing it says oppresses us.

Now the rhymes, which are the best evidence in the poem that nothing here is meant to resolve.

Three of the four are off. The one that lands perfectly is Despair with Air, and it lands in the stanza about a sealed imperial decree. The single moment the ear gets what it wants is the moment the poem says the sentence has been passed. A slant rhyme keeps a reader slightly unsatisfied, and the poem uses that discomfort as an instrument.

Who is speaking

There is no "I" anywhere in these sixteen lines. It is "us", twice, and "we", once. The speaker is not confessing a private mood; she is reporting something that happens to people, which is why the poem can end on a general fact about dead faces rather than on her own grief.

That matters for an essay. If you write that the speaker feels depressed on winter afternoons, you have swapped a claim about meaning for a claim about mood, and you have ignored the only pronouns in the poem.

Common misconceptions

• The poem is about seasonal sadness. The damage is located "Where the Meanings are", not in the mood; the light injures sense-making, not cheerfulness.
• Dickinson's dashes are eccentric punctuation to be ignored. They control where the voice stops, and the stanza-four dashes literally hold the breath the line describes.
• There is one right reading, and a teacher has it. There are readings the words support and readings they do not. "Certain" carrying two meanings at once is supported; a slant of light standing for a specific lost person is not.
• Slant rhyme means the poet could not find a proper rhyme. The one exact rhyme in the poem falls exactly where the poem talks about a sentence being sealed. That is a choice.

What to remember

• Ask what nearby word the poet rejected: Heft is not weight, and the difference is a hand.
• Imagery usually works as a set of related words spread across a poem, not as one picture.
• Syntax is meaning: a comma before "are" delays the verb and the reader feels it.
• The turn is a change in who feels, not a change of topic.
• Rhyme that refuses to resolve is an argument, not a failure.
• Bottom line: read the pronouns before you decide who the poem is about.

Sources

1. Dickinson, E. (n.d.). There's a certain Slant of light (258). Academy of American Poets. poets.org.
2. Dickinson, E. (1890). Poems by Emily Dickinson (M. L. Todd & T. W. Higginson, Eds.). Roberts Brothers. Full text at Project Gutenberg, gutenberg.org.
3. Johnson, T. H. (Ed.). (1955). The Poems of Emily Dickinson (Variorum ed., 3 vols.). Harvard University Press.
4. Arp, T. R., & Johnson, G. (2018). Perrine's Literature: Structure, Sound, and Sense (13th ed.), chapters on tone and musical devices. Cengage Learning.

A line that fights your mouth

Before you read anything else in this lesson, say this line aloud, twice, at speaking volume: Though worlds of wanwood leafmeal lie.

Two of those words did not exist before Gerard Manley Hopkins put them there. There is no wanwood in any dictionary he could have owned, and no leafmeal either. He made them, and yet you probably understood the line on the first pass. Working out how you did that is the work of this lesson.

Hopkins finished the poem at Lydiate, in Lancashire, on 7 September 1880, and wrote "sprung rhythm" beside it in the manuscript. He was a Jesuit priest; almost nothing of his was published in his lifetime, and the poems appeared in 1918, twenty-nine years after he died, edited by his friend Robert Bridges.

The point: In this poem the sound is not an ornament laid over the meaning. It is the means by which the meaning arrives.

The poem

Spring and Fall: to a young child

Margaret, are you grieving
Over Goldengrove unleaving?
Leaves, like the things of man, you
With your fresh thoughts care for, can you?
Ah! as the heart grows older
It will come to such sights colder
By and by, nor spare a sigh
Though worlds of wanwood leafmeal lie;
And yet you will weep and know why.
Now no matter, child, the name:
Sorrow's springs are the same.
Nor mouth had, no nor mind, expressed
What heart heard of, ghost guessed:
It is the blight man was born for,
It is Margaret you mourn for.

Hopkins marked his own stresses in the manuscript, and the marks are worth seeing, because they tell you where he wanted the voice to land: Margarét, áre you gríeving, and later Sórrow's spríngs áre the same. Read those two lines again with the weight on exactly those syllables.

Sprung rhythm, in plain terms

Most English verse counts syllables and stresses together: five beats and ten syllables in a line of blank verse. Sprung rhythm, which was Hopkins's own name for his system, counts only the stresses. Each line gets a fixed number of strong beats, and he may hang as many or as few weak syllables off them as he likes.

Compare two lines from the poem. "It will come to such sights colder" moves easily; the weak syllables cushion the beats. "Though worlds of wanwood leafmeal lie" has strong syllables crowded against each other, and your mouth has to slow down to get through them. Nothing about the grammar is hard. The consonants are hard.

That is the effect to name in an essay. The line about worlds of dead leaves is the line that takes longest to say, so the reader spends more time in it than in any other line of the poem. Hopkins has made a reader linger over rot by making rot difficult to pronounce.

What matters here: When a line is hard to say, ask what it is about. The difficulty is usually the point.

Four invented words

None of these is showing off, and each is doing something a real word could not. "Unleaving" is the best of them. English has a perfectly good word for what trees do in October, and it is "shedding". Hopkins needed a word that also meant staying, because the whole poem turns on the difference between a grove that will be back next spring and a child who will not be a child again.

So when a poem hands you a word you cannot look up, do three things. Break it into parts. Ask what ordinary word was available instead. Then ask what the invented one can mean that the ordinary one cannot.

Syntax you have to untangle

Lines three and four are the hardest sentence in the poem: Leaves, like the things of man, you / With your fresh thoughts care for, can you?

Put it in ordinary order and it reads: can you, with your fresh thoughts, care for leaves as if they were human things? The object comes first, the subject second, a comparison is wedged between them, and the verb arrives four words late. By the time you reach "care for", you have been held up three times.

That delay is the experience of the line. The speaker is asking a question he already half knows the answer to, and the sentence circles rather than going straight, which is what an adult sounds like when he is about to tell a child something sad. Then "can you?" at the end, a small tag question, gentle and hopeless.

One more piece of syntax, near the end: Nor mouth had, no nor mind, expressed / What heart heard of, ghost guessed. Four nouns, four short clauses, no articles at all. Hopkins strips out every "the" and "a" so that mouth, mind, heart and ghost stand as bare faculties. The grammar is compressed because the thought is: the grief is older than language, so the language reporting it has been stripped back too.

The two turns

The poem changes direction twice. The first turn is line five, "Ah! as the heart grows older". Until then the speaker has been asking questions. From there he is making a prediction, and the tense shifts to the future: it will come, you will weep.

The second turn is the colon in line thirteen, after "ghost guessed". Everything before it has been about leaves, autumn, and a child at the edge of a wood. Everything after it is about mortality: "It is the blight man was born for". The poem has been talking about one thing and meaning another for twelve lines, and then says so.

Which makes the last line land. "It is Margaret you mourn for." Not the grove. Herself. A child crying over fallen leaves is, without knowing it, crying because things die and she is a thing. Note the rhyme that carries it: born for, mourn for. Birth and grief pushed into the same sound.

Worth holding on to: The title was telling you this all along. Spring and Fall are the seasons, the two halves of a life, and in a poem by a priest, the Fall as well.

Alliteration that is not just noise

Count the repeated opening sounds and you will find them clustered, not scattered. "Goldengrove" and "grieving" put two hard g sounds in the first two lines, so the name of the wood and the child's crying are locked together before the poem has argued anything. Then "wanwood" and "leafmeal lie" run three heavy consonant clusters into one line. Then, at the end, "It is the blight man was born for, / It is Margaret you mourn for", where the repetition is not of sounds but of the whole opening phrase.

Vowels do a second job. "Older" and "colder" rhyme, but they also darken the line: both are long, low, slow sounds, and the couplet is about growing indifferent. Compare that with the bright short vowels of "fresh thoughts" two lines earlier. The child is quick and the future is slow, and the vowels say so before the sense does.

A warning about writing this up. Do not tell a reader that the alliteration in line eight "creates a musical effect". Every alliteration creates a musical effect; that sentence is true of every poem ever written, which is the swap test failing again. Say instead that the consonants slow the mouth, and that the slowed line is the one about a world of dead leaves.

Tone: tender and unsparing at once

It would be easy to read the speaker as cold. He tells a crying child that she will stop caring, that grief has one source, and that she is really mourning herself. Set against that: he calls her by name twice, says "Ah!", says "child", and asks rather than asserts for four lines before he tells her anything.

Hold both. The tone is an adult refusing to lie to a child he is fond of, and the poem is fifteen lines long because that is how long it takes to be kind and truthful at the same time. An essay that picks only one of those two notes has got the poem half right, which on this exam reads as wrong.

Common misconceptions

• Sound effects are decoration added after the meaning. The slowest line in the poem is the line about rot; the sound is carrying the argument.
• Invented words are the poet being obscure. Each coinage here does something no existing English word does, and "unleaving" holds two opposite senses at once.
• Hard word order means the poem is badly written. The delay in lines three and four is the sound of an adult approaching bad news slowly.
• The poem is about autumn. The colon in line thirteen announces otherwise, and the last word of the poem is a person's name.

The short version

• Sprung rhythm counts stresses, not syllables, so a line can be crowded or loose at will.
• A line that is hard to pronounce is usually a line about something hard.
• Break an invented compound into parts, then ask what ordinary word it replaced.
• Wrenched syntax delays a reader, and the delay is part of the meaning.
• Two turns: question to prophecy at line five, leaves to mortality at the colon.
• So what?: name the effect of a sound, never just the name of the device.

Sources

1. Hopkins, G. M. (1918). Spring and fall. In R. Bridges (Ed.), Poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins. Humphrey Milford. Full text at Project Gutenberg, gutenberg.org.
2. Hopkins, G. M. (n.d.). Spring and Fall. Academy of American Poets. poets.org.
3. Sprung rhythm. (n.d.). In Wikipedia. en.wikipedia.org.
4. Arp, T. R., & Johnson, G. (2018). Perrine's Literature: Structure, Sound, and Sense (13th ed.), chapter on rhythm and metre. Cengage Learning.

One word before the poem starts

Above the first line of Robert Browning's poem stands a single word and a colon: Ferrara:. That is the entire stage direction. From it, and from fifty-six lines of one man talking, you have to work out who is speaking, who is listening, where they are standing, and what has already happened. Nobody will tell you any of it.

The poem was published in 1842 in a book called Dramatic Lyrics, where it carried the title "Italy". Browning renamed it later. Here is its most famous sentence, with his dashes set as plain hyphens throughout this lesson: This grew; I gave commands; / Then all smiles stopped together.

Readers have argued about that line for a hundred and eighty years, and the argument is the lesson.

Key idea: In a dramatic monologue the speaker is a character, not the poet, and the poem's judgement of that character is delivered entirely through what he chooses to say.

Reconstructing the scene from the inside

Read what the Duke says and note every instruction he gives, because the instructions are the stage directions.

• "Will 't please you sit and look at her?" They are upstairs, in a private gallery, and the listener has been brought here.
• "since none puts by / The curtain I have drawn for you, but I" The portrait is kept covered. Only the Duke uncovers it.
• "The Count your master's known munificence / Is ample warrant that no just pretence / Of mine for dowry will be disallowed" The listener is an envoy, sent by a Count, and they are negotiating money for a marriage.
• "Though his fair daughter's self, as I avowed / At starting, is my object." The bride is the Count's daughter. The Duke says her person is his object, and says it immediately after discussing her price.
• "Will 't please you rise? ... Nay, we'll go / Together down, sir." The envoy has tried to go downstairs ahead of him. The Duke stops him.

So: a duke is showing the marriage broker of his next wife a painting of his last one, and explaining why she displeased him, on the stairs, on the way to dinner. Nothing in the poem states that situation. All of it is recoverable from the words.

The point: Before interpreting a dramatic monologue, build the scene from the speaker's own instructions. Half the meaning is in what the situation makes his words mean.

The charge sheet

What did she actually do? The Duke lists it, and the list is the most damaging thing in the poem, because it is so small.

Sir, 't was all one! My favour at her breast, / The dropping of the daylight in the West, / The bough of cherries some officious fool / Broke in the orchard for her, the white mule / She rode with round the terrace - all and each / Would draw from her alike the approving speech, / Or blush, at least.

She was pleased by a sunset. She was pleased by fruit somebody picked for her. She was pleased by her mule. And she was pleased by his gift, which is the item that matters, because his complaint is not that she was unfaithful. It is that she was equally grateful for a sunset and for a nine-hundred-year-old name. His grievance is a ranking problem.

Then the hesitations. She had / A heart - how shall I say? - too soon made glad, and She thanked men, - good! but thanked / Somehow - I know not how - as if she ranked / My gift of a nine-hundred-years-old name / With anybody's gift.

Those interruptions are performed. A man who cannot find the word does not find the exact word twice in nine lines. The Duke is pretending to grope for language in front of an audience, which tells you he is used to being listened to and to being admired for how well he speaks. Then, four lines later, he says outright: Even had you skill / In speech - (which I have not). He has just spent forty lines demonstrating that he has.

The line everyone argues about

Oh, sir, she smiled, no doubt, / Whene'er I passed her; but who passed without / Much the same smile? This grew; I gave commands; / Then all smiles stopped together.

Reading one: he had her killed. The evidence is real. "All smiles stopped together" is a total and permanent stopping, not a change of behaviour. The portrait is described in the first two lines as "Looking as if she were alive", and the phrase returns at line 47, "There she stands / As if alive", which only needs saying of someone who is not. He calls her "my last Duchess", the word you use of a series. And the closing image is Neptune "Taming a sea-horse", a god subduing a living creature, offered as the thing he is proudest of owning.

Reading two: he had her shut away. This is also supportable. "I gave commands" is what you say about an order to a household, and sixteenth-century Italy had convents for inconvenient wives. "All smiles stopped together" would be equally true of a woman removed from company. The real Duchess of Ferrara, Lucrezia de' Medici, married Alfonso II at thirteen in 1558 and died in April 1561 at sixteen; poisoning was rumoured at the time, but modern accounts think tuberculosis the likelier cause and the rumour the work of the Duke's enemies. Browning did not need a murder to have happened.

What would settle it? Nothing in the poem, and that is deliberate. Ask instead why Browning gives a man four euphemisms in a row: "This grew", "I gave commands", "all smiles stopped", and then, without a pause, "There she stands." A speaker who will not name the act is more frightening than one who confesses, because the refusal shows a habit. He has told this story before, in this room, to other envoys, and it has always worked.

Why this matters: On the exam, an ambiguity you name and hold is worth more than an ambiguity you resolve by guessing. Say what each reading rests on, then say what the ambiguity itself achieves.

Three objects, one habit

The poem is organised around things the Duke owns, and each one is a person turned into property.

The bronze is the sharpest stroke in the poem. He has just finished describing a wife who displeased him and a wife he is buying, and he turns to a statue of taming and says it was cast for him. He is not hinting. He does not think there is anything to hide.

Form: couplets you cannot hear

The poem is twenty-eight rhyming couplets in iambic pentameter, which ought to chime like a nursery rhyme, and does not. Browning runs almost every sentence across the line ending, so the rhyme is buried under the speaking voice. Read the opening aloud and you will barely notice that wall rhymes with call.

That buried rhyme is a piece of characterisation. Total control that does not look like control is exactly what the Duke has, and Browning gives him a verse form to match: rigid underneath, casual on the surface.

And once, the rhyme surfaces. This grew; I gave commands; / Then all smiles stopped together. There she stands. Commands, stands. The one couplet you actually hear is the couplet in which he admits what he did.

Common misconceptions

• The speaker's views are the poet's. Browning is not defending the Duke; he built him. In a dramatic monologue the poem's judgement lives in the gap between what the speaker means to reveal and what he reveals.
• There is one right reading of "I gave commands". Murder and confinement are both supportable. The unsupportable reading is that he merely spoke to her sternly, since "all smiles stopped together" is permanent.
• The Duchess was unfaithful. The poem never says so. Every item on the charge sheet is innocent, which is why the Duke's grievance is so revealing.
• The poem's ambiguity means anything goes. Readings must be paid for out of the text; two competing readings can both be evidenced, and a third can still be simply wrong.

Looking back

• A dramatic monologue gives you one speaker, one listener, one occasion, and no narrator to correct him.
• Build the scene from the speaker's own instructions before you interpret a word of it.
• The Duke's charge sheet is a list of innocent pleasures, which convicts him and not her.
• Performed hesitation is a boast about fluency, not a failure of it.
• Two readings of "I gave commands" are supportable; naming both and weighing them beats picking one blindly.
• In short: the rhyme you finally hear is the sentence he was trying not to say.

Sources

1. Browning, R. (1842). My last duchess. In Dramatic Lyrics. Edward Moxon. Text at the Academy of American Poets, poets.org.
2. My Last Duchess. (n.d.). In Wikipedia. en.wikipedia.org.
3. Dramatic monologue. (n.d.). In Wikipedia. en.wikipedia.org.
4. Foster, T. C. (2014). How to Read Literature Like a Professor (Rev. ed.), chapter on irony. Harper Perennial.

A sentence that earns zero

Here is a sentence from a real student essay, of a kind AP readers see several thousand times each June.

In Sonnet 73, Shakespeare uses the metaphor of autumn to represent old age, which shows that the speaker is getting old.

Everything in it is true. It earns nothing. Work out why, and you will have the single most valuable habit this course can give you, because the same fault costs marks on the poetry essay, the prose essay and the open question alike.

There are four separate failures buried in that one sentence. We will take them in order, against the poem.

The poem

That time of year thou mayst in me behold
When yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang
Upon those boughs which shake against the cold,
Bare ruin'd choirs, where late the sweet birds sang.

In me thou see'st the twilight of such day
As after sunset fadeth in the west;
Which by and by black night doth take away,
Death's second self, that seals up all in rest.

In me thou see'st the glowing of such fire,
That on the ashes of his youth doth lie,
As the death-bed, whereon it must expire,
Consum'd with that which it was nourish'd by.

This thou perceiv'st, which makes thy love more strong,
To love that well, which thou must leave ere long.

Fourteen lines, printed in 1609 in Shake-speares Sonnets. An older speaker tells a younger person what to see when they look at him.

Failure one: naming is not explaining

"Shakespeare uses the metaphor of autumn" stops exactly where the work begins. Compare two sentences about the same four words.

The test is simple. If your sentence would still be true after you swapped the quotation for a different one, you have named rather than explained. "Shakespeare uses a metaphor" is true of almost every line he wrote.

The point: A reader cannot award the evidence-and-commentary points for a label. The label tells them you recognised a thing; the commentary tells them you read it.

Failure two: "represents" smuggles in a code

"Autumn represents old age" describes a cipher: autumn equals old age, so substitute and move on. But then the poem is a puzzle with a key, and once you have the key the lines themselves are disposable.

Test it on line four. If autumn simply equals old age, why "choirs"? Nothing about being sixty is choral. The word is doing something the code cannot explain. "Choir", spelled quire in 1609, names the part of a church where the singers sit. Shakespeare's readers had grown up among roofless abbeys, stripped after the monasteries were dissolved in the 1530s: stone arches open to the sky, where services used to be sung. So the line puts three pictures on top of one another. Bare branches against a winter sky. The broken tracery of a ruined church. And birds that sang there until recently, which were also choristers.

A metaphor is not a substitution. It is two things held close enough that each changes how you see the other. After line four, the speaker's ageing body has acquired the specific sadness of a wrecked holy building, and no paraphrase keeps that.

Failure three: there is not one metaphor, there are three

Each quatrain starts again with a new image, and the three are not interchangeable. Lay them out and the poem's argument appears.

Read down the right-hand column. The span of each image shrinks by roughly an order of magnitude, so that the closer the poem gets to the end, the faster the end comes. Nothing in the words says "I am running out of time". The structure of the figures says it.

That is what a sequence of images can do that a single image cannot, and it is the kind of observation that earns the sophistication point: not a cleverer label, but a pattern across the whole text.

Worth holding on to: When a poem gives you several figures for the same thing, the relationship between them is usually the argument.

Failure four: it ignores the last two lines

The third quatrain ends on a paradox: Consum'd with that which it was nourish'd by. The fire is put out by the same wood that fed it; the ash that smothers the glow is the log that made it. Applied to a person, it says the years that built him are the years killing him. There is no villain and no accident. Living is the cause of death.

Then the couplet turns outward: This thou perceiv'st, which makes thy love more strong, / To love that well, which thou must leave ere long. The poem has not been about the speaker's decline at all. It has been an argument aimed at the listener, and its conclusion is a claim about how love works: knowing a thing is nearly over makes you love it harder.

And "which thou must leave ere long" is genuinely unsettled. The natural sense is that the young man will soon lose the speaker, since it is the speaker who is dying. Read it that way and "leave" is doing something strange, because it puts the departure on the listener's side. The ambiguity is worth naming rather than smoothing over: the dying man describes his own death as the other person leaving him.

The figures worth knowing, and what each does

Learn these as jobs, not as vocabulary.

The sentence, repaired

Here is the zero-mark sentence rewritten so that it earns something.

The three images the speaker offers, a dying year, a dying day and a dying fire, shrink from months to hours to minutes, so that the sonnet accelerates toward its own end even while the speaker's tone stays calm; by the time the fire is "Consum'd with that which it was nourish'd by", the poem has made ageing not an event but a process with no cause outside itself.

Notice what changed. The quotations are specific and short. Each is followed by a claim about effect. And the sentence says something a reader could argue with, which means it is worth defending.

Common misconceptions

• Figurative language is decoration added to plain meaning. "Bare ruin'd choirs" is not a prettier way of saying "old"; it adds the wreck of something sacred, and the plain version cannot.
• A metaphor is a code with a key. If autumn simply equalled old age, the word "choirs" would be pointless. Metaphor changes both of the things it joins.
• Spotting more devices means a better essay. Two figures fully explained beats eight listed. Readers score explanation, not inventory.
• The poem is about the speaker. The couplet redirects everything at the listener and makes a claim about how love responds to loss.

What you now know

• A named device earns nothing; the commentary that follows it earns four of the six points.
• If your sentence stays true when the quotation is swapped, you have labelled rather than read.
• Metaphor is mutual: the ruined choir changes the body and the body changes the choir.
• A sequence of figures argues through its pattern, here by shrinking from months to minutes.
• Paradox cannot be paraphrased, which is why poems use it at the point of greatest pressure.
• Bottom line: ask what the figure does to the reader, never what the figure is called.

Sources

1. Shakespeare, W. (1609). Sonnet 73. In Shake-speares Sonnets. Thomas Thorpe. Full text at Project Gutenberg, gutenberg.org.
2. Sonnet 73. (n.d.). In Wikipedia. en.wikipedia.org.
3. Empson, W. (1930). Seven Types of Ambiguity. Chatto and Windus. The reading of "Bare ruin'd choirs" in chapter 1 is the classic discussion of this line.
4. Foster, T. C. (2014). How to Read Literature Like a Professor (Rev. ed.), chapters on symbol and interpretation. Harper Perennial.

Nineteen lines, thirteen of them different

Edwin Arlington Robinson's poem about an abandoned house is nineteen lines long. Only thirteen of those lines are different from one another; six are repeats. And the whole poem runs on two rhyme sounds, away and still, for all nineteen.

They are all gone away,
  The House is shut and still,
There is nothing more to say.

Through broken walls and gray
  The winds blow bleak and shrill:
They are all gone away.

Nor is there one to-day
  To speak them good or ill:
There is nothing more to say.

Why is it then we stray
  Around that sunken sill?
They are all gone away,

And our poor fancy-play
  For them is wasted skill:
There is nothing more to say.

There is ruin and decay
  In the House on the Hill:
They are all gone away,
There is nothing more to say.

Now read what the poem says while it does that. It says twice that there is nothing more to say, and then says it six more times. It asks, in line ten, why we keep coming back to this house, and the form has already answered: because you cannot stop. A villanelle is built to return, and Robinson gave the shape to a subject that cannot be left alone.

Key idea: A form is not a container you pour a poem into. It is a machine that does something to the reader, and a good poet picks the machine that does what the poem needs.

Four shapes, side by side

The sonnet: a deadline with a hinge

Shakespeare's Sonnet 29 opens in misery.

When in disgrace with fortune and men's eyes
I all alone beweep my outcast state,
And trouble deaf heaven with my bootless cries,
And look upon myself, and curse my fate,

Eight lines of that, piling up: wishing he looked like someone else, had someone else's friends, someone else's talent. Then line nine.

Yet in these thoughts my self almost despising,
Haply I think on thee, and then my state,
Like to the lark at break of day arising
From sullen earth, sings hymns at heaven's gate;

One word, "Yet", and the poem changes altitude. That hinge is the volta, and in a sonnet it almost always falls at or near line nine, whichever variety you are reading.

Two varieties matter. The Italian or Petrarchan sonnet divides eight lines against six: a problem, then a response. The English or Shakespearean sonnet divides three quatrains against a closing couplet, which lets it do something the Italian cannot: build for twelve lines and then snap shut in two. Sometimes that couplet confirms the argument, as in Sonnet 29. Sometimes it undercuts it. Either way the reader can see it coming, because the shape is public.

Scan the first line to hear the pulse: when IN, dis-GRACE, with FOR, tune AND, men's EYES. Five pairs, the weak syllable then the strong one. That is iambic pentameter, and it is the default rhythm of English verse because it is roughly the length of a spoken breath.

Why this matters: In a sonnet, the question to ask is never "does it rhyme?" but "where does it turn, and what does the turn cost?"

Blank verse: a pulse under ordinary speech

Frost opens Mending Wall in 1914 with a New England farmer and a stone wall that keeps falling down. Late in the poem he says this:

Before I built a wall I'd ask to know
What I was walling in or walling out,
And to whom I was like to give offence.

Read it aloud and it sounds like a man thinking out loud over a fence. Now scan the first of those lines: be-FORE, i BUILT, a WALL, i'd ASK, to KNOW. Five beats, unrhymed. It is the same metre as the sonnet with the rhyme taken away, and taking the rhyme away is precisely what lets it pass for speech.

This is why Shakespeare wrote his plays in it. A form that can hold a farmer's grumble can also hold a prince deciding whether to live. Blank verse is the English compromise between the rhythm of poetry and the sound of a person talking, and when a passage on the exam looks like prose arranged in lines of roughly equal length with no rhymes, count to five beats before you call it free verse.

Free verse: where the structure hides

Walt Whitman has no metre and no rhyme, so everything depends on something else.

A noiseless patient spider,
I mark'd where on a little promontory it stood isolated,
Mark'd how to explore the vacant vast surrounding,
It launch'd forth filament, filament, filament out of itself,
Ever unreeling them, ever tirelessly speeding them.

And you O my soul where you stand,
Surrounded, detached, in measureless oceans of space,
Ceaselessly musing, venturing, throwing, seeking the spheres to connect them,
Till the bridge you will need be form'd, till the ductile anchor hold,
Till the gossamer thread you fling catch somewhere, O my soul.

Two stanzas of five lines. The first is a spider; the second is a soul. Whitman never says "my soul is like a spider", and he does not have to, because the structure says it: each stanza opens with its subject, each describes a thing alone in an emptiness, each ends with a reaching-out repeated three times. "Ever, ever" in the first; "Till, till, till" in the second.

So the comparison lives in the white space between the two stanzas. Take away that gap and you have a list. Keep it and you have an argument with a silence in the middle where the reader does the work.

That is how free verse holds together: not by metre but by parallel syntax, by repetition, and by where the poet chose to break the line. Notice "filament, filament, filament" in the first stanza, which puts the spinning into the sentence, and the long unbroken third line of the second stanza, which makes the soul's search feel like it cannot stop for breath.

What a stanza break does

A stanza break does one of three jobs, and naming which one is worth more than naming the stanza length.

• A beat of silence. Whitman's gap is where the reader makes the connection the poem refuses to state.
• A change of scale or speaker. In the Dickinson poem two lessons ago, the last stanza pulls back from the body to the landscape, and a new stanza marks the move.
• A place to hide a leap. Robinson's breaks let him move from walls to winds to a question about us, while the refrain pretends nothing has changed.

Naming the form without writing a glossary

On the exam, a sentence like "This poem is a villanelle, which has nineteen lines, two refrains, and an ABA rhyme scheme" costs you time and earns nothing. The form is visible; the reader can count.

Use this pattern instead: name the form in four or five words, then spend the rest of the sentence on what it does here.

Robinson chose the villanelle's two returning lines for a poem about a house nobody can stop visiting, so that each new observation is interrupted by a line the reader has already heard, and by the final quatrain the claim that there is nothing more to say has been made eight times.

The most famous villanelle in English, Do not go gentle into that good night, was written by Dylan Thomas in 1951 and is still in copyright, so read it elsewhere and note only this: Thomas used the same returning machine to refuse a death, where Robinson used it to circle a loss. Same form, opposite jobs.

Common misconceptions

• Free verse has no structure. It has all of it in the line breaks, the repetitions and the parallel syntax, which is why those are the things to quote.
• Blank verse means unrhymed poetry of any kind. Blank verse is specifically unrhymed iambic pentameter. Count to five beats before you use the term.
• Identifying the form is the analysis. The form is public information. What the form does to this poem's material is the analysis.
• A strict form limits a poet. Robinson's refrain says "there is nothing more to say" while the form forces him to keep saying it, and the contradiction is the poem.

Pulling it together

• Sonnet: fourteen lines, a turn near line nine, and a deadline the reader can feel.
• Villanelle: two refrains that make escape impossible, which suits obsession and grief.
• Blank verse: unrhymed iambic pentameter, the form that can sound like a person talking.
• Free verse: structure carried by line break, repetition and parallel syntax instead of metre.
• A stanza break is silence, a change of scale, or a hidden leap; say which.
• The upshot: name the form in five words, then write about what it makes happen.

Sources

1. Robinson, E. A. (1897). The house on the hill. In The Children of the Night. Richard G. Badger. Full text at Project Gutenberg, gutenberg.org.
2. Whitman, W. (1891). A noiseless patient spider. In Leaves of Grass. Full text at Project Gutenberg, gutenberg.org.
3. Frost, R. (1914). Mending wall. In North of Boston. Henry Holt. Full text at Project Gutenberg, gutenberg.org.
4. Villanelle. (n.d.). In Wikipedia. en.wikipedia.org.
5. Arp, T. R., & Johnson, G. (2018). Perrine's Literature: Structure, Sound, and Sense (13th ed.), chapters on pattern and sonnet form. Cengage Learning.

Two lines, and a question about kindness

Before reading further, decide whether the second speaker here is being pleasant. Two men are walking through a burial vault, drinking.

"I drink," he said, "to the buried that repose around us."
"And I to your long life."

On the page it is a courtesy. In the story it is a countdown. The man offering the toast has spent the last hour steering his companion deeper underground, and within an hour he will chain him to a wall and brick him in alive. Nothing in the sentence changes. Everything about it does.

That gap, between what a sentence says and what the situation makes it mean, is irony. It is the hardest thing on this exam to write about well, because it cannot be spotted in a single line; you have to prove it from two places at once.

The point: Irony is never in the words alone. It lives in the distance between the words and something else the text has established.

Three kinds, and what each asks of you

Edgar Allan Poe published The Cask of Amontillado in November 1846. A narrator named Montresor tells how he murdered a man named Fortunato during carnival. All three kinds of irony are in it, doing different jobs.

Take the dramatic case slowly, because it is the one students most often miss. Fortunato asks about the Montresor coat of arms, and Montresor describes it: A huge human foot d'or, in a field azure; the foot crushes a serpent rampant whose fangs are imbedded in the heel. A foot crushing a snake that has bitten it. Then the motto: Nemo me impune lacessit, no one provokes me without punishment.

Fortunato's reply is one word. "Good!" He has just been shown a picture of a man taking revenge on something that hurt him, been told the family creed of unpunished retaliation, and he compliments the design. The reader has all the information Fortunato has. Only the reader uses it.

Verbal irony, worked

Montresor spends the descent begging Fortunato to turn back. "Your health is precious. You are rich, respected, admired, beloved; you are happy, as once I was. You are a man to be missed."

Read "You are a man to be missed" twice. The first time it is flattery. The second time it is a description of what will happen after Friday. Then Fortunato, coughing, says "I shall not die of a cough", and Montresor answers, "True, true."

That "True, true" is the sharpest line in the story, and it is two words long. It is not sarcasm, because sarcasm needs to be heard as sarcasm; Fortunato hears agreement. It is a sentence that is literally accurate, sincerely delivered, and murderous. He will not die of a cough.

The best example of all comes when Fortunato makes a secret hand sign and Montresor says he is a mason too. Asked for proof, "It is this," I answered, producing a trowel from beneath the folds of my roquelaire. A pun and a confession in one gesture. Fortunato laughs it off as a joke. It was the murder weapon being shown to the victim.

Remember: Verbal irony does not require a knowing wink. The most effective kind is delivered flat, believed by the listener, and understood only by the reader.

Ambiguity: what the story refuses to tell you

The first sentence is: The thousand injuries of Fortunato I had borne as I best could, but when he ventured upon insult, I vowed revenge. What was the insult? Poe never says. Not once in the whole story.

That absence is doing work. If we knew the injury, we could weigh the revenge against it, and the story would become a question about proportion. Without it, we cannot check Montresor's account at all, and we are left with a narrator whose grievance may be enormous or may be nothing.

The second sentence adds a stranger gap: You, who so well know the nature of my soul. Who is "you"? A friend, a priest at a deathbed, a court, the reader? Poe does not say. And at the very end: For the half of a century no mortal has disturbed them. Montresor has kept this to himself for fifty years and is telling it now, to someone who knows his soul.

Notice how to handle this in an essay. You do not solve the ambiguity; you name it and say what it produces. Fifty years of silence broken to an unnamed intimate makes the story either a confession or a boast, and the text supports both, which is exactly why the last line, In pace requiescat, may be a prayer or a taunt.

Tone: the calm is the evidence

Tone is the attitude a voice takes toward its subject, and here the tone is the whole case against the narrator. Montresor never raises his voice. He is precise about vintages, courteous about coughs, careful with a torch. When his victim finally goes silent, he writes: My heart grew sick on account of the dampness of the catacombs.

Read that sentence again. It begins as remorse and then explains itself away in six words. A man who feels something and immediately files it under humidity is a man with a habit of not looking at himself. Poe never tells us Montresor is a monster; the sentence structure does.

So when you are asked for tone, avoid one-word answers like "dark" or "creepy". Say what the voice is doing: calm, exact, faintly proud, and unwilling to name the one thing that would explain it.

Hardy: a stammer inside a jaunty metre

Thomas Hardy dated a short poem 1902, during the South African war, and collected it in 1909. A soldier explains, in a pub voice, why he shot a man.

"Had he and I but met
By some old ancient inn,
We should have sat us down to wet
Right many a nipperkin!

"But ranged as infantry,
And staring face to face,
I shot at him as he at me,
And killed him in his place.

"I shot him dead because -
Because he was my foe,
Just so: my foe of course he was;
That's clear enough; although

"He thought he'd 'list, perhaps,
Off-hand like - just as I -
Was out of work - had sold his traps -
No other reason why.

"Yes; quaint and curious war is!
You shoot a fellow down
You'd treat if met where any bar is,
Or help to half-a-crown."

The situational irony is obvious and stated by the speaker himself: these two would have bought each other drinks. What is not obvious is where the poem actually turns, and it turns on punctuation.

Look at stanza three. I shot him dead because - / Because he was my foe,. He starts the reason, breaks off, and restarts with the same word. Then he reassures himself three times in two lines: "Just so", "of course he was", "That's clear enough". Nobody says a thing is clear three times unless it has stopped being clear. And the stanza ends on "although", left hanging over the white space with nothing after it until the next stanza begins.

Then the last stanza gives us the word the whole poem is built to expose. "Quaint and curious." Those are words for a teapot. Applied to killing a man who enlisted because he was out of work and had sold his tools, they are so undersized that the reader supplies the missing outrage. Hardy never states an opinion about the war. He gives a decent man a vocabulary too small for what he has done and lets us hear the gap.

What matters here: Understatement is irony working by subtraction. When the words are too small for the event, the reader fills the difference, and that filling is the effect to write about.

Three tests before you call something ironic

• Can you point at both sides of the gap? Name the line and name the thing elsewhere in the text that contradicts it. "And I to your long life" plus the vow of revenge in paragraph one.
• Does the text let a reader see both? If nothing in the story lets us know more than the character, it is not dramatic irony; it is just a surprise.
• Does it do something? Irony that produces nothing is coincidence. Fortunato's motley matters because it makes him a fool in the eyes of a man who is treating him as one.

Common misconceptions

• Irony is the same as sarcasm. Sarcasm is meant to be heard. Montresor's "True, true" is meant to be believed, which is what makes it terrifying.
• Irony is just something unexpected happening. Rain on a wedding day is bad luck. Irony needs a reversal the text has set up, and Fortunato's name and costume are set up on purpose.
• An ambiguous text can mean anything. Poe withholds the insult, which supports several readings of Montresor's grievance, and rules out the reading that he had no grievance he believed in.
• Tone is one adjective. "Creepy" describes your reaction. "Courteous, exact and faintly proud" describes the voice, and only the second can be quoted for.

The takeaway

• Verbal irony: the speaker's words against his meaning, often delivered flat and believed.
• Dramatic irony: the reader's knowledge against a character's, as with the coat of arms.
• Situational irony: expectation against outcome, as with a man named the fortunate one in a jester's cap.
• Ambiguity is named and used, not solved: fifty years of silence makes the tale confession or boast.
• Understatement works by subtraction, and "quaint and curious" is too small on purpose.
• The core of it: to prove irony, point at both sides of the gap and say what the gap does.

Sources

1. Poe, E. A. (1846). The cask of Amontillado. Godey's Lady's Book. Full text at Project Gutenberg, gutenberg.org.
2. Hardy, T. (1909). The man he killed. In Time's Laughingstocks and Other Verses. Macmillan. Full text at Project Gutenberg, gutenberg.org.
3. Irony. (n.d.). In Wikipedia. en.wikipedia.org.
4. Arp, T. R., & Johnson, G. (2018). Perrine's Literature: Structure, Sound, and Sense (13th ed.), chapter on irony. Cengage Learning.

Fourteen words that start a plot

At a country dance in Hertfordshire, a rich stranger is asked to dance with a girl who is standing out. He glances at her, catches her eye, looks away, and says this:

"She is tolerable: but not handsome enough to tempt me; and I am in no humour at present to give consequence to young ladies who are slighted by other men."

She hears him. Jane Austen does not tell us how she feels. What she tells us, a few lines later, is that Elizabeth Bennet remained with no very cordial feelings toward him and told the story with great spirit among her friends. That is the whole characterisation: she is wounded, and her response to being wounded is to make it funny for an audience.

By the end of the novel she will have changed her mind about the man, and more importantly about herself, and she will say so in six words that are the hinge of the whole book. Getting from the dance to those six words is what this lesson is about.

Key idea: A character is not a description. A character is a set of responses, shown often enough that you can predict the next one, and then broken.

Four channels, and what each is worth

Writers build characters through four channels. They are not equal, and the exam rewards you for knowing which one a passage is using.

That last row matters more than students expect. Austen gives us Elizabeth's thoughts and withholds Darcy's, which is why the novel's first half feels like a comedy about a proud man and its second half turns out to have been a comedy about a clever woman who was wrong. The novel's structure of access is the novel's argument.

Why this matters: When a narrator lets you inside one head and not another, that choice is characterisation too, and it is usually worth an essay paragraph.

The direct and the indirect

Direct characterisation tells you: she was clever and quick. Indirect characterisation shows you something and makes you conclude it. Austen uses both, often in the same breath, and the indirect is always the part worth quoting.

Take the moment Elizabeth refuses Darcy's first proposal. She does not simply say no. She says he is the last man in the world whom I could ever be prevailed on to marry. Note the construction: not "I will not marry you" but a superlative ranking, the kind of absolute statement that a novel of six hundred pages exists to punish. And Darcy's reply is ten words of wounded formality: "You have said quite enough, madam. I perfectly comprehend your feelings." Neither of them says anything about love. They are both busy being right.

The six words

Darcy writes her a letter. She reads it twice, and then Austen gives her a page of thought that ends here:

"How despicably have I acted! I, who have prided myself on my discernment! ... Pleased with the preference of one, and offended by the neglect of the other, on the very beginning of our acquaintance, I have courted prepossession and ignorance, and driven reason away where either were concerned. Till this moment, I never knew myself."

Three things are happening in that speech, and an essay should name all three.

First, she does not discover that Darcy is good. She discovers that her own judgement was bought. "Pleased with the preference of one, and offended by the neglect of the other" is a confession that she believed the man who flattered her and disbelieved the man who slighted her, for that reason and no other.

Second, the vocabulary is hers. "Discernment" and "prepossession" are the words of a woman proud of her mind, and she is using them to describe the failure of her mind. The register does not slip into plainness. She is still the cleverest person in the book, which is why the fall hurts.

Third, the title. Her error was prejudice, in the old sense of a judgement formed in advance; his was pride. The sentence "Till this moment, I never knew myself" is where the novel's two abstractions turn into one person's experience.

Changing, and being revealed

This is the distinction that separates a real answer from a plot summary. Some characters change. Others are only shown to you more fully, which feels like change but is not.

A character who does not change is not a failure of writing. E. M. Forster, in 1927, called such characters flat, and meant it as a technical term rather than an insult: a flat character can be summed up in a sentence and can be brought on at any moment to do exactly one thing. Mr. Collins is flat and unforgettable. Round characters, Forster said, are capable of surprising us, and a novel can only afford a few.

Worth holding on to: If you cannot name a before and an after in the character's own words, the character was revealed, not changed, and saying so is the stronger claim.

Foils, and what they measure

A foil is a character placed next to another so that a difference shows. Austen surrounds Elizabeth with them.

• Charlotte Lucas accepts Mr. Collins for a home and an income, having stated plainly that she is not romantic. She is not a fool, and she is not punished by the novel. She measures exactly what Elizabeth is risking by refusing to be practical.
• Jane Bennet thinks well of everybody. Her generosity is real, and it also makes her unable to see Bingley's sisters for what they are. She measures the cost of Elizabeth's sharpness by showing the cost of its opposite.
• Lydia Bennet does what Elizabeth is accused of doing, following her feelings, with none of the judgement. She measures the difference between spirit and impulse.

Note that each foil is a working person in her own right, not a device. That is the test of a good foil and the reason to write about one: the contrast has to cost the foil something.

How not to write about character

The commonest wasted paragraph on Question 2 is a biography. It goes: the character is introduced, then this happens to her, then she meets him, then she realises, then she marries. Every sentence is true and the paragraph earns nothing, because nothing in it is a claim.

Use this shape instead. Name the channel, quote four words, say what the construction does. For example: Austen gives Elizabeth the vocabulary of a critic, "discernment", "prepossession", and then makes her apply it to her own mistake, so the self-knowledge she gains is measured in the very terms she was proudest of, and the novel can punish her judgement without making her stupid.

Common misconceptions

• A character is what the narrator says they are like. Action under pressure outranks description, and what other characters say may characterise only the speaker.
• Flat characters are badly written. Forster's term is descriptive. Mr. Collins does one thing perfectly and the novel needs him to.
• Any development counts as change. If the character behaves the same way in the last chapter as in the first, the reader changed and the character did not.
• Writing about character means retelling the plot. Name the channel, quote briefly, and claim an effect; a summary is the one thing readers are told not to reward.

What to carry forward

• Four channels: speech, action, others' reports, and narrated thought, in roughly that order of reliability.
• Whose head you are allowed into is itself a decision worth analysing.
• Elizabeth's turn is not discovering Darcy's worth but discovering that her judgement had been flattered.
• Change needs a before and an after in the character's own words; otherwise it is revelation.
• A foil must cost something in its own right, or it is a device rather than a character.
• In short: name the channel, quote four words, claim an effect, and never write a biography.

Sources

1. Austen, J. (1813). Pride and Prejudice. T. Egerton. Full text at Project Gutenberg, gutenberg.org.
2. Elizabeth Bennet. (n.d.). In Wikipedia. en.wikipedia.org.
3. Forster, E. M. (1927). Aspects of the Novel. Edward Arnold. The flat and round distinction is set out in chapter 4.
4. College Board. (2019). AP English Literature and Composition: Course and exam description, Big Idea 1: Character. College Board.

The same job, two opposite methods

Two writers open a story by describing a landscape at dusk. One is an American in 1839 riding toward a house; one is an Englishman in 1878 looking at a stretch of moorland. Both are doing the same thing, making a place carry a feeling. Neither does it the same way, and setting the two side by side teaches more than either alone.

Poe first. The narrator of The Fall of the House of Usher arrives:

I looked upon the scene before me, upon the mere house, and the simple landscape features of the domain, upon the bleak walls, upon the vacant eye-like windows, upon a few rank sedges, and upon a few white trunks of decayed trees, with an utter depression of soul.

Now Hardy, opening The Return of the Native:

A Saturday afternoon in November was approaching the time of twilight, and the vast tract of unenclosed wild known as Egdon Heath embrowned itself moment by moment. Overhead the hollow stretch of whitish cloud shutting out the sky was as a tent which had the whole heath for its floor.

Key idea: Setting is the where and when. Atmosphere is what the where and when do to a reader, and it is built out of specific word choices you can point to.

Poe: repetition as pressure

Count the prepositions in Poe's sentence. Upon, upon, upon, upon, upon, upon. Six times in one sentence, each one dragging the eye to another dead thing: bleak walls, vacant windows, rank sedges, decayed trees. The grammar refuses to move on. It is the sentence equivalent of a man who cannot stop looking.

Then the crucial phrase: "vacant eye-like windows". The house is given a face without being called a face. Poe does not write that the house is watching; he writes that its windows are like eyes and that they are vacant, which is worse. Something with eyes that is not looking is not alive and not dead either.

Later he goes further. The narrator imagines that around the house hangs an atmosphere which had no affinity with the air of heaven, but which had reeked up from the decayed trees, and the gray wall, and the silent tarn, a pestilent and mystic vapor, dull, sluggish, faintly discernible, and leaden-hued. The house is exhaling. And note that Poe frames it as the narrator's fancy, "so ridiculous, indeed, that I but mention it": the atmosphere is announced as imagination and then behaves throughout the story as fact.

One more detail, easy to miss and worth an essay paragraph on its own. The narrator notices a barely perceptible fissure, which, extending from the roof of the building in front, made its way down the wall in a zigzag direction, until it became lost in the sullen waters of the tarn. A crack, hardly visible, running the whole height of the house. Poe mentions it once, casually, on page two. At the end of the story the house splits along it and sinks into the tarn. The setting has been carrying the plot from the first paragraph.

The upshot: In Poe, the place is a diagnosis. The house is described in the vocabulary of a sick body, and the family inside it is dying of the same thing.

Hardy: scale as pressure

Hardy's method is the opposite. Where Poe crowds, Hardy expands.

In such contrast the heath wore the appearance of an instalment of night which had taken up its place before its astronomical hour was come: darkness had to a great extent arrived hereon, while day stood distinct in the sky. Looking upwards, a furze-cutter would have been inclined to continue work; looking down, he would have decided to finish his faggot and go home.

That furze-cutter is the finest touch in the passage. Hardy could have written that the heath was darker than the sky. Instead he invents a working man, gives him a job, and shows him getting two different answers about the time of day depending on which way he tilts his head. The abstraction becomes a decision somebody has to make.

Then the sentence that turns landscape into character: The face of the heath by its mere complexion added half an hour to evening; it could in like manner retard the dawn, sadden noon, anticipate the frowning of storms scarcely generated. Face. Complexion. Sadden. Frowning. The heath is not compared to a person; it is given a person's features and a person's moods, and then credited with the power to alter time.

And the chapter's title tells you Hardy knew exactly what he was doing: A Face on Which Time Makes but Little Impression.

The comparison, laid out

Read the last row across. Both writers use setting to produce dread, and they produce two different dreads. Poe's reader feels trapped; Hardy's reader feels unimportant. Naming which of the two a passage is doing is exactly the kind of precision Question 2 rewards.

The pathetic fallacy, and when it is a fault

Giving nature human feelings has a name: the pathetic fallacy, coined by John Ruskin in 1856, who meant it as a criticism. Weeping skies at a funeral are the cheap version, and Ruskin's complaint was that a writer who reaches for it is telling you what to feel instead of showing you a reason.

So when is it good? When the text acknowledges that the projection belongs to somebody. Poe's narrator says outright that the vapour is a fancy of his own, which turns the device into characterisation: we learn less about the house than about the man riding toward it. Hardy grounds his heath in geology and history, the ancient barrows, the Roman road, so that when he calls it sad the sadness has a documented age behind it.

What matters here: A landscape that feels is only worth writing about if you can say whose feeling it is and why the text hands it over.

What setting does, beyond mood

• It limits what can happen. A story on an unenclosed heath in 1840 cannot use a telephone, a police force, or a neighbour within earshot. Constraint generates plot.
• It dates the values. Elizabeth Bennet's problem is a legal one: an entailed estate that cannot pass to daughters. Move the setting and the novel loses its engine.
• It supplies contrast. Carnival in Poe's other story is bright, loud and above ground; the catacombs are the opposite, and the descent is the story.
• It can be a character. The heath acts: it retards dawn, saddens noon, and outlives the people who try to leave it.

Common misconceptions

• Setting means the time and place named at the start. Setting includes weather, season, hour, social arrangements and the law, and any of those may be the one doing the work.
• Description is filler to be skimmed. Poe hides the ending in a fissure mentioned on page two, and Question 2 passages are frequently chosen for exactly such details.
• Atmosphere is the same as setting. Setting is the facts; atmosphere is what the facts are made to feel like, and the same place can be given two atmospheres by two writers.
• A landscape with human feelings is always effective. Ruskin named it a fallacy for a reason. It earns its place when the text shows whose projection it is.

Summing up

• Setting is the where and when; atmosphere is the effect built out of chosen words.
• Poe crowds a small space with repetition and gives a house a face it is never said to have.
• Hardy expands, invents a furze-cutter to make the abstraction a decision, and hands the heath a complexion.
• Both produce dread; one is claustrophobia and the other is insignificance, and the difference is the answer.
• The pathetic fallacy works when the text shows whose feeling is being projected.
• Remember: a detail mentioned once and casually, like a hairline crack, is usually load-bearing.

Sources

1. Poe, E. A. (1839). The fall of the house of Usher. In The Works of Edgar Allan Poe, Volume 2. Full text at Project Gutenberg, gutenberg.org.
2. Hardy, T. (1878). The Return of the Native. Smith, Elder. Full text at Project Gutenberg, gutenberg.org.
3. Pathetic fallacy. (n.d.). In Wikipedia. en.wikipedia.org.
4. Ruskin, J. (1856). Of the pathetic fallacy. In Modern Painters (Vol. 3, Part 4, ch. 12). Smith, Elder.
5. College Board. (2019). AP English Literature and Composition: Course and exam description, Big Idea 2: Setting. College Board.

A question nobody asked

A story from 1843 begins like this. Dashes are set as plain hyphens throughout this lesson.

True! - nervous - very, very dreadfully nervous I had been and am; but why will you say that I am mad? The disease had sharpened my senses - not destroyed - not dulled them.

Read the second sentence again. Why will you say that I am mad? Nobody has said it. There is no "you" in the story, no accusation on the page, no previous line. The narrator of The Tell-Tale Heart opens by defending himself against a charge that exists only inside his own head, and in doing so proves it.

Then he offers his evidence: Hearken! and observe how healthily - how calmly I can tell you the whole story. Six exclamation marks and four dashes in the first paragraph. The claim is calm; the prose is not. That contradiction, between what a narrator asserts and what his own telling demonstrates, is the whole mechanism of unreliable narration.

Key idea: An unreliable narrator is not one who lies. He is one whose account and the text's evidence pull apart, so the reader ends up knowing something the narrator does not.

The choices a writer makes about who tells

Ask two questions of any passage. Whose eyes am I behind? And what is this position preventing me from seeing? The second question is the one that produces essay paragraphs, because a limitation is a decision.

The signals that a narrator is not to be taken straight

• Protesting a charge nobody made. "Why will you say that I am mad?"
• A gap between claim and style. Calmness asserted in a paragraph full of exclamations.
• A motive that keeps changing. Poe's narrator says he loved the old man, had no desire for his gold, and then settles on the eye.
• Other characters reacting to something the narrator does not report. Nobody else in the room can hear the heartbeat.
• An interest in the outcome. A narrator who needs to be believed for reasons of his own is worth checking.

Note that none of these requires the narrator to be lying. Poe's murderer believes every word. The term unreliable narrator was given its modern definition by Wayne Booth in 1961, and his point was exactly this: the reader and the author come to an agreement behind the narrator's back.

The hardest case in English fiction

Henry James published The Turn of the Screw in 1898. A young governess takes charge of two children at a country house. She comes to believe that two dead servants, Peter Quint and Miss Jessel, are appearing to the children and corrupting them. She fights to save them. At the end of the story the boy, Miles, is dead in her arms.

Before you get a single word from her, James puts three layers between you and her. An unnamed narrator describes a Christmas house party. A man called Douglas produces a manuscript, in old, faded ink, and in the most beautiful hand, written by a woman who is now dead. He reads it aloud. Only then does the governess speak. James has built a frame that makes it impossible to check anything.

Readers have divided over this book since 1934, when Edmund Wilson argued that there are no ghosts at all and the governess is a repressed young woman hallucinating. Here is the case on each side, from the text.

The case that the ghosts are real

The strongest evidence is a single scene. After seeing a man on the tower, the governess describes him to the housekeeper, Mrs. Grose: red hair, small whiskers, no hat, clothes that are not his own. Mrs. Grose names him: Peter Quint, dead. The governess had never met Quint, never heard of him, and had no way of knowing what he looked like.

That is not a hallucination unless the novel is cheating. Add the frame: Douglas vouches for the woman personally and says she was the most agreeable person he ever knew in her position. Add that Miles has in fact been expelled from school for something never specified, so something was already wrong before she arrived.

The case that she is imagining them

Nobody else sees anything, ever. When she points across the lake at Miss Jessel, Mrs. Grose's reply is a shout: "What a dreadful turn, to be sure, miss! Where on earth do you see anything?" The governess insists, thrusting her at the figure, and Mrs. Grose looks and sees water.

Flora, aged eight, is more brutal: "I don't know what you mean. I see nobody. I see nothing. I never have. I think you're cruel. I don't like you!"

And the last page. The governess demands that Miles name Quint. He turns, stares, and the text says he had already jerked straight round, stared, glared again, and seen but the quiet day. Seen the quiet day. Nothing there. Then: We were alone with the quiet day, and his little heart, dispossessed, had stopped.

Read that sentence coldly and it describes a woman who has frightened a ten-year-old to death while holding him. Add the circumstances: she is twenty, alone, in love with an employer who has forbidden her to write to him, and she has arrived wanting to be heroic.

What would settle it

Nothing in the book, and James arranged that on purpose. In his 1908 preface he described the story as a trap laid for the reader who is confident of not being caught. The frame is triple, the only witness is dead, and every apparition is reported by the one person who sees them.

So what do you write? Not a verdict. Write the mechanism. James makes both readings fully available and then makes the choice cost something: believe her and the story is about evil defeating a brave woman; disbelieve her and it is about a rescue that kills the person rescued. The reader cannot stay neutral, and the book is built so that whichever way you go, you have accused someone.

Why this matters: A dispute with real evidence on both sides is the best possible material for the sophistication point, provided you weigh the evidence instead of announcing that the text is open to interpretation.

Distance: how far is the narrator from the story

One more variable, easily missed. A first-person narrator may be telling you about something that happened an hour ago or fifty years ago, and the distance changes everything.

Poe's murderer is close: present tense keeps breaking in, and he is still arguing his case. Montresor, in the story from the previous lesson, is fifty years away and perfectly composed. Joyce's narrator in Araby is an adult remembering himself as a boy, which is why the story can end with a judgement the boy could not have made about himself.

When you meet a first-person passage on Question 2, find out how old the telling is. The answer is usually in the tenses.

Common misconceptions

• An unreliable narrator is a narrator who lies. Poe's narrator believes himself entirely, and that is what makes him useful to Poe.
• First person is more honest than third. First person is more intimate and less checkable, which is the opposite of honest by design.
• Ambiguity means every reading is equal. Both Turn of the Screw readings must be paid for from the text, and a reading that ignores Mrs. Grose naming Quint is simply weaker.
• The narrator is the author. James is not the governess and Poe is not the murderer; the gap between author and narrator is where the meaning is manufactured.

Recap

• Ask whose eyes you are behind, then ask what that position prevents you from seeing.
• Unreliability shows as a gap between what a narrator claims and what the telling demonstrates.
• Poe's narrator answers an accusation that has not been made, and the syntax refutes the claim of calm.
• James triple-frames the governess's account so that it cannot be checked against anything.
• Both readings of the ghosts are evidenced; the essay names the mechanism rather than delivering a verdict.
• Bottom line: find the distance between the telling and the events, because the tenses will tell you.

Sources

1. James, H. (1898). The Turn of the Screw. William Heinemann. Full text at Project Gutenberg, gutenberg.org.
2. Poe, E. A. (1843). The tell-tale heart. In The Works of Edgar Allan Poe, Volume 2. Full text at Project Gutenberg, gutenberg.org.
3. Unreliable narrator. (n.d.). In Wikipedia. en.wikipedia.org.
4. Booth, W. C. (1961). The Rhetoric of Fiction. University of Chicago Press.
5. Wilson, E. (1934). The ambiguity of Henry James. Hound and Horn, 7(3), 385-406.

Map one story, step by step

We are going to take a fourteen-page story apart in order and see where its structure actually lives. The story is Araby, from Joyce's Dubliners. A boy in Dublin falls for a neighbour's sister, promises to buy her something at a bazaar, arrives too late, and goes home.

That is the whole plot. Written out like that it sounds like nothing happens, and an essay that summarised it would earn nothing. So here is the sequence as Joyce built it, with the function of each step.

Now read step eight in Joyce's own words: Gazing up into the darkness I saw myself as a creature driven and derided by vanity; and my eyes burned with anguish and anger.

Key idea: Nothing in this story is caused by the boy. The structure is a chain of delays, and the only event is a change in how he sees himself.

Where the diagram breaks

You have probably been taught a pyramid: exposition, rising action, climax, falling action, resolution. It comes from Gustav Freytag's 1863 study of drama, and for a five-act play it works well. For a modern short story it fits badly, and knowing why is more useful than knowing the diagram.

Try it on Araby. Exposition: the street, fine. Rising action: the delays, fine. Climax: where? The boy does not act, fight, choose, or win. Falling action and resolution: there is none; the story stops one sentence after its highest point.

Joyce called this kind of ending an epiphany: a sudden revelation of what something is, arriving through an ordinary object or moment. Every story in Dubliners is built toward one. So the shape is not a pyramid but a funnel, narrowing until a single sentence of self-knowledge is forced out.

Two more structural terms worth having. A story that opens in the middle of the action, skipping the background, starts in medias res. A story that interrupts itself to show something earlier uses a flashback, and the question to ask of a flashback is never what it tells you but why it arrives where it does.

Reading the order as the argument

Here is the test that turns structure into an essay paragraph. Move something, and see what breaks.

Suppose Joyce had put the dead priest's house at the end of the story instead of the beginning. The boy's disillusion would then read as something that happened to him in one bad evening. Placed first, the decay is the condition he starts in, and the bazaar only shows him what was already true. Same details, opposite meaning, purely because of order.

Or suppose the uncle had come home on time and the boy had bought a gift. Every delay in the story would become an obstacle overcome, and Araby would be a story about persistence. Joyce needs the failure to be small and nobody's fault, because the point is that nothing dramatic is required to crush this boy.

What matters here: To write about structure, name one thing that would change if the order changed. That single sentence is worth more than a full plot summary.

A story that refuses to end: Chekhov

Anton Chekhov's Gooseberries, from 1898, is built in a different shape again. Two men shelter from rain at a friend's house, and one of them, Ivan Ivanovitch, tells a story about his brother, who spent his life saving for a country estate and finally got one.

The centre of the inner story is a plate of fruit. Then he put one gooseberry in his mouth, looked at me with the triumph of a child who has at last received his favourite toy, and said: "How delicious!" And he ate them greedily, continually repeating, "Ah, how delicious! Do taste them!" Then one line of narration: They were sour and unripe.

Three words do the work of a chapter. The brother's whole life has arrived, and it tastes of nothing, and he does not know. Ivan Ivanovitch then generalises into the most famous passage Chekhov wrote about happiness: There ought to be behind the door of every happy, contented man some one standing with a hammer continually reminding him with a tap that there are unhappy people. But there is no man with a hammer; the happy man lives at his ease.

Now the structural surprise. Chekhov does not end on that. He ends on the listeners: Ivan Ivanovitch's story had not satisfied either Burkin or Alehin. They are bored. They would rather talk about elegant people and women. Then the host is sleepy, the rain goes on, and the story closes.

That is a deliberate refusal of resolution. A writer who wanted the speech to land would end with the hammer. Chekhov ends by showing the speech failing to reach two reasonable men in a warm room, which makes the story's subject not the gooseberries but the difficulty of being heard about anything that would disturb a comfortable evening.

The shape of a longer work

A novel or play cannot be held in the hand the way a short story can, so ask a different question: what situation happens twice?

• Pride and Prejudice: two proposals from the same man. The first is refused with a superlative; the second is accepted quietly. Everything the novel has done sits in the gap between them.
• Hamlet: two chances to kill Claudius. He passes the first, at prayer, on a reason he invents, and takes the second only when he is dying himself.
• Dubliners: fifteen stories, each ending in an arrest rather than a resolution, so the collection argues that the city itself is the thing that does not move.

A repeated situation with a changed outcome is the most reliable structural evidence there is, because it lets you prove development without summarising anything. Find the pair, quote four words from each, and say what the difference measures.

Common misconceptions

• Every story has a climax where the protagonist acts. In Araby nothing is caused by the boy, and in Gooseberries the speech simply fails to land.
• Structure means the order events happened in. Structure is the order the writer chose to put them in, which may be entirely different and is always the thing to analyse.
• A story without a resolution is unfinished. Chekhov and Joyce end at the point of greatest discomfort on purpose, and both endings are exactly where the meaning is.
• Writing about plot means retelling it. Name one thing that would change if the order changed, and you have written about structure instead.

The short version

• Map a story by function, not by event: what is each step for?
• Freytag's pyramid was built for five-act drama and fits a modern story poorly.
• Joyce's shape is a funnel ending in an epiphany, not a pyramid ending in a resolution.
• Chekhov withholds resolution and ends on bored listeners, which relocates the subject.
• In long works, find the situation that happens twice and measure the difference.
• So what?: move one element in your head, and whatever breaks is what the structure was doing.

Sources

1. Joyce, J. (1914). Araby. In Dubliners. Grant Richards. Full text at Project Gutenberg, gutenberg.org.
2. Chekhov, A. (1918). Gooseberries. In The Wife and Other Stories (C. Garnett, Trans.). Chatto and Windus. Full text at Project Gutenberg, gutenberg.org.
3. Dramatic structure. (n.d.). In Wikipedia. en.wikipedia.org.
4. Freytag, G. (1863). Die Technik des Dramas. S. Hirzel. The five-part pyramid comes from this study of five-act drama.
5. College Board. (2019). AP English Literature and Composition: Course and exam description, Big Idea 3: Structure. College Board.

A play that ends without a line

The last thing that happens in Henrik Ibsen's A Doll's House is not spoken. Torvald Helmer, alone, has one last flicker of hope. Then:

[The sound of a door shutting is heard from below.]

That is the end of the play. It premiered at the Royal Danish Theatre in Copenhagen on 21 December 1879 and the noise of that door became the most discussed sound effect in European theatre. It is an event with no words, no actor visible, and nothing for a reader to interpret except its placement.

Which is the whole problem of reading drama. A novel has a narrator standing between you and the events, telling you what to notice. A play has nobody. Everything you get is speech, action, and whatever stage directions the playwright chose to leave. Reading a play well means doing the director's job in your head.

Key idea: In drama, nobody explains. Every judgement you make has to be built from what characters say, what they do, and what the text puts on stage beside them.

The soliloquy is not a summary of feelings

Students often treat a soliloquy as a character telling the audience how he feels. Look at what is actually happening in the best-known one in English.

To be, or not to be, that is the question:
Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer
The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,
Or to take arms against a sea of troubles,
And by opposing end them?

Two things about that. First, it is a question, and Hamlet never answers it; the speech is interrupted, and the play goes on. Second, and stranger, count the personal pronouns. There are none. Not one "I" in the famous passage. He writes "by a sleep to say we end the heart-ache", "when we have shuffled off this mortal coil", "must give us pause".

A man contemplating his own death has phrased the whole thing as a general problem in philosophy. That is characterisation of a very precise kind: this is a person who converts his own crisis into an argument, which is exactly what the plot of Hamlet keeps punishing him for.

A soliloquy where you can watch a reason being built

Now the scene that shows what a soliloquy can do that no other form of speech can. Hamlet finds Claudius alone, kneeling, unguarded. He draws.

Now might I do it pat, now he is praying.
And now I'll do't. And so he goes to heaven;
And so am I reveng'd. That would be scann'd:
A villain kills my father, and for that
I, his sole son, do this same villain send
To heaven. O, this is hire and salary, not revenge.

Watch the sequence. Line one: the opportunity. Line two: the decision, made. Then, in the same line, an objection arrives. "That would be scann'd" means this needs looking into, and by line six he has produced a theological reason to put the sword away.

Nobody else is on stage. There is no one to persuade. He is persuading himself, and because we are watching him do it, we can weigh the reason and notice it is convenient. That is the peculiar power of soliloquy: it does not report a state of mind, it exhibits a process, and it hands the audience the evidence to judge it with.

Why this matters: Ask of any soliloquy what the character is trying to do with it. Decide, delay, confess, recruit, or excuse. Naming that is analysis; paraphrasing the speech is not.

Iago, and the audience made complicit

In the first scene of Othello, Iago tells Roderigo that his loyalty to the general is a performance, and finishes: For daws to peck at: I am not what I am. Four monosyllables that cancel identity itself.

What matters structurally is who hears his plans. Iago's soliloquies at the ends of scenes tell the audience what he intends before he does it. The result is that we spend the play knowing more than Othello does and unable to warn him, which converts the audience from observers into something closer to accomplices.

Compare the two men. Hamlet uses soliloquy to postpone action. Iago uses it to schedule it. Same device, opposite function, and the difference is worth an entire essay paragraph on either play.

Staging: reading the theatre off the page

Shakespeare's texts give you almost nothing: entrances, exits, and the occasional death. Ibsen gives you rooms, furniture, and the exact business of putting on a hat. So you read them differently.

Silence is the most underused evidence in both. Ask who is on stage and not talking. In the final scene of A Doll's House, Nora's lines are short and practical while she puts on a cloak, then a hat, then a shawl. Ibsen gives us the dressing in three separate directions, spaced out, so that the audience watches her leave in stages while Torvald argues. The costume change is the argument's answer.

What a scene is for

A scene is not a chunk of story. It is a unit of change, and three questions open any of them.

• Who wants what? Nora wants to be released. Torvald wants the marriage to continue on the old terms.
• What stands in the way? Each is the obstacle for the other, which is why the scene is almost entirely two people.
• What is different at the end? The rings have been exchanged back, the keys are on the table, and the door has shut. Three physical facts, no speeches.

Apply the same three questions to the prayer scene and you get: Hamlet wants revenge, the obstacle is his own reasoning, and what is different at the end is that Claudius is alive and Hamlet has acquired a justification he will need again.

How much a single sound can carry

One more fact about that door, because it shows how much weight staging holds. Ibsen's German agent believed audiences would not accept the ending, and copyright at the time gave a playwright no protection against a translator rewriting him. So Ibsen wrote an alternative himself, for the German premiere in 1880, in which Nora is led to her sleeping children, collapses, and stays. He called the change a barbaric outrage committed on his own play.

That is the clearest possible demonstration that the ending is not decoration. Remove one sound effect and the play argues the opposite thing. Virtually every production since uses the original.

Common misconceptions

• A soliloquy tells the audience how a character feels. It shows a character doing something with words: deciding, delaying, recruiting or excusing. Name the action.
• Characters in soliloquy always tell the truth. They believe themselves, which is not the same. Hamlet's theological objection is convenient and arrives one line after he has decided.
• Stage directions are the least important part of a play. The last line of A Doll's House is one, and it is the ending.
• Silent characters can be ignored. Who is on stage and not speaking is often the strongest evidence a scene supplies.

What to remember

• Drama has no narrator, so every judgement is built from speech, action and staging.
• Hamlet's most famous soliloquy contains no first-person pronoun, which is characterisation, not accident.
• The prayer scene exhibits a reason being constructed, so the audience can weigh it.
• Iago's soliloquies schedule action and make the audience complicit; Hamlet's postpone it.
• Shakespeare's staging is inferred from lines; Ibsen's is written out, and both reward the same question.
• The point: a scene is a unit of change, so ask who wants what, what resists, and what is physically different at the end.

Sources

1. Shakespeare, W. (1603). Hamlet. Full text at Project Gutenberg, gutenberg.org.
2. Shakespeare, W. (1622). Othello. Full text at Project Gutenberg, gutenberg.org.
3. Ibsen, H. (1879). A Doll's House (W. Archer, Trans.). Full text at Project Gutenberg, gutenberg.org.
4. A Doll's House. (n.d.). In Wikipedia. en.wikipedia.org.
5. College Board. (2019). AP English Literature and Composition: Course and exam description, units on longer fiction or drama. College Board.

Three sentences about one play

Here are three things a student might write about A Doll's House. All three are true. Only one of them is a reading.

• Nora Helmer forges a signature to borrow money, her husband finds out, and she leaves him at the end of the play.
• A Doll's House teaches us that women should be treated as equals in marriage.
• Ibsen builds Nora's marriage out of pet names and small economies, then lets Torvald's reaction to the forgery expose that the economy was the marriage, so the door she shuts is not a protest against her husband but the end of a transaction she had been mistaking for love.

The first is a summary: it reports events and makes no claim. The second is a moral: it converts a three-act play into an instruction and could have been written without reading it. The third is an interpretation, and the difference is that somebody could argue with it, using the play.

Key idea: A theme is not a lesson a work delivers. It is a claim about what a work argues, and it has to be the kind of claim evidence can support or damage.

A real disagreement about what theme is

This is not settled territory, and knowing the two positions will make you better at the third one, which is what the exam wants.

The first position is older and still the common-sense one: a work has a meaning, the writer put it there, and the reader's job is to find it. On this view, criticism is a kind of retrieval. Its strength is that it takes writers seriously as people who knew what they were doing, and it explains why a reading that contradicts everything in a book feels wrong rather than merely unpopular.

The second position says that any sentence beginning "the theme of this work is" has already lost the work. Cleanth Brooks, writing in 1947, called paraphrase a heresy: the argument was that a poem's meaning is inseparable from its words, its rhythm and its order, so the moment you restate it in other words you are discussing a different and poorer object. Its strength is that it is obviously right about good poems. Nobody has ever paraphrased Hopkins without losing the poem.

Notice that both positions are defending something worth keeping. The first protects the text from arbitrary readings. The second protects it from being flattened into a slogan.

What the exam asks for, which is neither

The wording on Question 3 is precise: analyse how something contributes to an interpretation of the work as a whole. Not the interpretation. An interpretation. One you can defend.

That wording does real work. It concedes that a book supports more than one account of itself, and it demands that yours be a claim about the whole thing rather than a comment on a scene. A reading is therefore allowed to be partial, provisional and arguable. It is not allowed to be vague, and it is not allowed to be unearned.

So the practical shape of a theme statement is: because the work does X, it ends up arguing Y. The "because" is what separates it from a moral. A moral floats free of the text; an interpretation is tethered to something the text does.

Worth holding on to: If your statement of theme would fit a different book by swapping two nouns, it is a moral, not a reading.

The author's intention does not decide

In May 1898, at a banquet of the Norwegian Association for Women's Rights, Ibsen told the assembled company that he had to disclaim the honour of having consciously worked for the women's rights movement, and that his task had been the description of humanity. Nineteen years after writing the most famous play about a woman walking out of a marriage, he denied having written it on purpose.

So is A Doll's House about women's rights? The playwright says not consciously. The play puts a woman on stage who cannot borrow money without a man's signature, is addressed by her husband as a small animal, and discovers that her legal position and her emotional position are the same position. Miriam Schneir included the play in an anthology of essential feminist writings. The critic Michael Meyer argued its theme is not women's rights at all but the need of any person to find out who they are.

What do you do with that? Two American critics, W. K. Wimsatt and Monroe Beardsley, gave the problem a name in 1946: the intentional fallacy. Their argument was not that writers are unreliable about their own work, but that intention is unavailable evidence. The only thing a reader has is the text. And a finished work contains things its author did not plan, because that is what happens when you build something complicated out of language.

This matters practically. An essay that says "Ibsen wanted to show..." has staked its claim on something no reader can check. An essay that says "the play gives Nora no legal capacity and then gives her the last sound in the theatre" has staked it on the page.

Four tests for a statement of theme

The fourth is the one that separates good essays from competent ones, and it is where the sophistication point lives. A reader who writes "this reading does not easily account for Dr. Rank, whose illness belongs to a different argument about inheritance" has shown more judgement than one who pretends the play is tidy.

Three statements, scored

Apply the tests to three candidate themes for Chekhov's Gooseberries.

A. The story shows that money cannot buy happiness. Arguable? No. Whole? Possibly. Specific? It would fit a thousand works. Costly? It leaves out the entire frame. This earns the thesis point from a generous reader and nothing else.

B. Chekhov criticises the Russian landowning class of the 1890s. Arguable, specific, and about the whole. But it cannot explain why the story ends on two bored listeners rather than on the brother, so it is a reading of the inner story only.

C. By ending not on the sour gooseberries but on two comfortable men who find the story dreary and would rather discuss elegant women, Chekhov turns a tale about one man's self-deception into a demonstration that such tales do not travel: the hammer at the happy man's door goes unheard even when somebody is standing there knocking. Arguable, whole, specific to this text, and it knows what it costs, since it has to treat the brother as the means rather than the subject.

C is the only one of the three that could not have been written without reading the story to the last line.

Common misconceptions

• The author's intention decides what a work means. Intention is not available to a reader, and Ibsen's own disclaimer about women's rights does not remove the legal and linguistic facts his play puts on stage.
• There is one right reading and a teacher has it. The exam asks for an interpretation, not the interpretation. What is not permitted is a reading the text contradicts.
• A theme is a moral. Morals can be written without reading the book. Themes have a "because" in them that points at something the work does.
• A good reading explains everything. No reading does, and saying what yours leaves out is the strongest move available on the sophistication row.

Looking back

• Summary reports, a moral instructs, an interpretation claims something arguable about the whole work.
• Brooks was right that paraphrase loses a poem; the answer is not to stop interpreting but to keep the text in the sentence.
• The exam's phrase is "an interpretation", which concedes plurality and demands defensibility.
• Intention is unavailable evidence; the page is the only thing both you and your reader have.
• Test a theme statement four ways: arguable, whole, specific, and honest about its cost.
• In short: if swapping two nouns would make your theme fit another book, you have not written one yet.

Sources

1. A Doll's House. (n.d.). In Wikipedia. Includes Ibsen's 1898 speech to the Norwegian Association for Women's Rights and Michael Meyer's counter-reading. en.wikipedia.org.
2. Authorial intent. (n.d.). In Wikipedia. en.wikipedia.org.
3. Brooks, C. (1947). The heresy of paraphrase. In The Well Wrought Urn: Studies in the Structure of Poetry. Reynal and Hitchcock.
4. Wimsatt, W. K., & Beardsley, M. C. (1946). The intentional fallacy. The Sewanee Review, 54(3), 468-488.
5. Chekhov, A. (1918). Gooseberries. In The Wife and Other Stories (C. Garnett, Trans.). Full text at Project Gutenberg, gutenberg.org.

A paragraph that looks right and is not

Here is the prompt. It is written in the shape the open question always uses.

In many works of literature, a character states a truth that the listener is not prepared to hear. Choose a work of fiction or drama in which such a moment occurs, and analyse how it contributes to an interpretation of the work as a whole.

Call it the literary argument essay, to keep it apart from the argument essay on the Language exam. There, the evidence is whatever you know from reading and experience. Here, every piece of evidence is a detail from one work of fiction or drama, and the commentary is your interpretation of that detail. The rubric uses the same words for both; what earns the points is different.

Now a paragraph written on that prompt about A Doll's House. Read it before reading the diagnosis, and decide what you would give it out of six.

Paragraph A. In A Doll's House by Henrik Ibsen, Nora Helmer tells her husband Torvald a truth he is not prepared to hear. Throughout the play Nora has been treated like a child by her husband, who calls her names like squirrel and skylark. At the end of the play she finally tells him that she is leaving because she has to educate herself. Ibsen uses symbolism, irony and dialogue to develop this important theme. This shows that Torvald was never really listening to his wife, which is very significant to the play as a whole.

Most students would guess four. It scores one.

Key idea: The rubric does not reward essays that sound like essays. It rewards a defensible claim, evidence attached to it, and commentary that connects the two.

Scoring Paragraph A, row by row

Find the exact sentence where it dies. It is the fourth: Ibsen uses symbolism, irony and dialogue to develop this important theme. That sentence is where the writer had the chance to say what the pet names do and instead reached for a list. The words "important" and "significant" are doing the job that evidence should be doing.

Paragraph B: better, and stuck at three

Paragraph B. Ibsen shows that the Helmer marriage runs on a language in which only one person gets to name things. Torvald calls Nora his "little skylark" and his "squirrel", and she answers to both. When Nora finally says "I have been your doll-wife, just as at home I was papa's doll-child", she takes his vocabulary and turns it against him. This is a powerful moment because it shows how she has changed over the course of the play. Ibsen wants the audience to see that Nora has finally found her voice, which is why the ending is so effective.

Row A now scores one. "A language in which only one person gets to name things" is arguable, specific, and about the whole play.

Row B scores two. There is real evidence, quoted and short, and one genuine piece of commentary: she takes his vocabulary and turns it against him. But then the paragraph stops explaining and starts praising. Look at the last two sentences. "Powerful", "shows how she has changed", "found her voice", "so effective". Four assertions, no analysis. And "Ibsen wants the audience to see" appeals to intention, which nobody can check.

Row C scores zero, because nothing is put under pressure.

The point: Row B stops at two when a writer explains one quotation and then compliments the rest. The word "consistently" in the four-point description means every piece of evidence gets the same treatment as the first.

Paragraph C: the same idea, scored six

Paragraph C. Ibsen builds the Helmer marriage out of a private vocabulary that only Torvald is licensed to use. He calls Nora his "little skylark" and his "squirrel"; she never gives him a name in return, and every one of his is an animal that is fed rather than consulted. That asymmetry is what makes her sentence in the last act structurally violent rather than merely sad: when she says "I have been your doll-wife, just as at home I was papa's doll-child", she does not invent a new word for herself, she accepts his and extends it backwards through her whole life, which converts his affection into a description of two men doing the same thing to the same person. Torvald's reply, that no man sacrifices his honour for the one he loves, is not a refusal to listen but a demonstration that he has heard and has a settled answer, and that is the harder claim the play makes: the truth is spoken clearly, in his own terms, and it changes nothing, because the vocabulary he taught her is not a misunderstanding to be cleared up but the arrangement itself. The reading has a cost, since it makes Nora's final hope of a real wedlock harder to explain than a straightforwardly triumphant ending would.

The line of reasoning, made visible

Paragraph C is not longer because it contains more information. It is longer because each claim needs the one before it. Strip it to its skeleton:

1. Only Torvald names things.
2. His names are all of fed animals, and she returns none.
3. Therefore, when she uses his word for herself, she is not inventing but extending.
4. Extending it backwards to her father makes marriage and childhood the same arrangement.
5. Torvald's answer shows he understood, which means the play is not about a failure to communicate.
6. Which is why the door, not the speech, is the ending.

Remove step two and step three collapses. That dependence is what the rubric means by a line of reasoning: not a list of points about the same topic, but a sequence where each claim is paid for by the last.

A useful test while writing: put the word "therefore" between your sentences. If it fits, you have reasoning. If only "also" fits, you have a list.

Remember: a paragraph that could be reordered at random was never a line of reasoning.

Where the sophistication point actually comes from

The rubric offers four routes, and only some of them are practical in forty minutes.

• Exploring a tension or complexity. The most reliable. Paragraph C does it by pointing out that being heard perfectly changes nothing.
• Naming what your reading costs. One clause, and it demonstrates judgement rather than claiming it.
• Placing the reading in a broader context. Workable if you genuinely know the context; dangerous if you are guessing at history.
• A style that is consistently vivid and persuasive. Real, but it is awarded for the whole essay and cannot be aimed at in one sentence.

What does not earn it: a grand closing sentence about the human condition, a reference to how the work is still relevant today, or the phrase "on a deeper level".

Common misconceptions

• Longer essays score higher. Paragraph A is not much shorter than B and scores a third as well. Length correlates with score only because explaining takes words, and unexplained words add nothing.
• You need to name the devices. Paragraph C names none. It describes what the vocabulary does, which is the thing being scored.
• A strong conclusion can rescue a weak body. Row B is decided by the middle of the essay, and it is four of the six points.
• Saying what the author wanted is analysis. "Ibsen wants the audience to see" is an appeal to evidence nobody has; describe the page instead.

Putting it together

• Row A is a claim someone could argue with; a restatement of the prompt scores zero.
• Row B stops at two when one quotation is explained and the rest are praised.
• Four points require commentary on every piece of evidence and more than one technique at work.
• A line of reasoning is a sequence where removing a step breaks the next one; test it with "therefore".
• The sophistication point comes most reliably from naming a tension or the cost of your reading.
• The upshot: stop writing "this shows how important it is" and write what it does.

Sources

1. College Board. (2019). AP English Literature and Composition: Course and exam description (pp. 171-190, free-response scoring rubrics for Questions 1, 2 and 3). College Board.
2. College Board. (n.d.). AP past exam questions and scoring guidelines. AP Central. apcentral.collegeboard.org.
3. Ibsen, H. (1879). A Doll's House (W. Archer, Trans.). Full text at Project Gutenberg, gutenberg.org.
4. Foster, T. C. (2014). How to Read Literature Like a Professor (Rev. ed.). Harper Perennial.

Three works, one prompt, three outcomes

Suppose the open question reads: Choose a work in which a character makes a decision that cannot be undone, and analyse how that decision contributes to an interpretation of the work as a whole. Here are three works this course has used, and how each of them would actually go.

Read the Pride and Prejudice column carefully, because it shows the commonest self-inflicted wound on Question 3. The work is excellent. The fit is not. A student who loves the novel will spend six minutes forcing it and write a worse essay than the student who reached for the play that happens to end on the exact thing being asked about.

Key idea: The open question is a matching problem before it is a writing problem. Preparation means having enough works that one of them fits.

What makes a work exam-ready

Enjoyment is not on this list, and neither is length or fame.

• It rewards analysis. "Literary merit" is not snobbery here; it means the text does more than tell you what happened, so there is something to explain.
• You can produce eight specific moments without notes. Not eight themes. Eight moments: a line, a gesture, an object, a scene, each locatable by act or chapter.
• It contains a genuine tension. Row C is easiest when the work itself refuses to settle something.
• It flexes. Ask whether it could answer prompts about a choice, a conflict, an outsider, a setting that matters, a changed relationship, and an ending. A work that only answers one of those is a liability.
• Its ending argues something. Whole-work claims are far easier when the last page takes a position.

A work you find dull but know in detail beats a work you love and remember in outline. This is the least romantic sentence in the course and the most useful.

Two works, from different rooms

Prepare two, not one, and make them different in kind: one play and one novel, or one nineteenth-century work and one twentieth. The reason is coverage. A prompt about a character overhearing something suits drama; a prompt about a narrator's limited knowledge suits fiction and is nearly unanswerable from a play.

Three is fine if you genuinely have three. Six is a fantasy, and the effort would have been better spent knowing two properly.

Why this matters: The five minutes you spend choosing badly cost more than any other five minutes in the exam, because everything after them is built on the choice.

The preparation sheet

One side of paper per work, made from memory and then checked. Five parts.

Part 2 is the part people skip and the part that earns Row B. Eight moments with four words each is thirty-two words of memorised quotation, which is a single evening's work and the difference between two points and four.

Reading the prompt properly

Every open question has two halves, and students answer the first and forget the second.

Choose a work in which a character makes a decision that cannot be undone is half one: the matching problem. Analyse how that decision contributes to an interpretation of the work as a whole is half two: the actual task.

Underline both. Then write your thesis so that it contains both halves in one sentence, which forces the connection early. If your thesis mentions only the decision, you have written about half the question, and Row A will not be awarded for it.

One more habit: circle any qualifying word. Prompts often say "a character who is not the protagonist", or "a work of fiction or drama", or "a setting that is unfamiliar to the main character". Those qualifiers are load-bearing, and ignoring one can invalidate an otherwise good essay.

Forty minutes, spent

The poem gets read twice because a poem's first sentence often does not resolve until its last, and the second reading is where the turn becomes visible. The prose passage gets one careful reading and a longer plan, because the danger with prose is quoting too much and explaining too little.

Two rules about the clock. First, move on at forty minutes even mid-sentence; a fourth essay does not exist, but a missing third one costs a third of the section. Second, if you are behind, cut the introduction rather than the commentary. A thesis can be the first sentence of the first body paragraph and lose nothing.

When you go blank

• On a poem: find the pronouns. Who speaks, to whom, about whom? Then find the one word you would not have chosen and start there.
• On prose: count the speeches and the silences. Who talks, who is described, whose head are you inside?
• On the open question: go straight to your eight moments and pick the three that touch the prompt. The thesis will assemble itself out of what they have in common.

Common misconceptions

• You should pick the most impressive book you have read. Readers score the essay, not the reading list, and a hard book half-remembered produces a vague essay.
• You must use a work from the printed list. The list is a memory aid; any work of literary merit qualifies, including one you chose yourself.
• An introduction is required. A thesis is required. A paragraph of throat-clearing before it is optional and expensive.
• Running over on an essay you are enjoying is fine. The three essays are worth the same, and the unwritten one scores zero on all three rows.

The takeaway

• The open question is a matching problem: prepare enough works that one of them fits cleanly.
• Exam-ready means eight recallable moments, a real tension, an ending that argues, and flexibility across prompt types.
• Two works from different kinds cover far more prompts than two similar ones.
• Underline both halves of the prompt and put both into the thesis sentence.
• Read a poem twice, plan prose longer, and cut the introduction before you cut commentary.
• Bottom line: at forty minutes, stop, even mid-sentence.

Sources

1. College Board. (n.d.). AP English Literature and Composition exam. AP Central. apcentral.collegeboard.org.
2. College Board. (n.d.). AP past exam questions and scoring guidelines. AP Central. apcentral.collegeboard.org.
3. College Board. (2019). AP English Literature and Composition: Course and exam description, Question 3 prompt structure and suggested works. College Board.
4. Foster, T. C. (2014). How to Read Literature Like a Professor (Rev. ed.). Harper Perennial.

Before you read on

This lesson is a practice, and reading the answers first will waste it. Set a timer. Part one is six multiple-choice questions and should take eight minutes. Part two is a poetry analysis essay and should take forty. Do both, then read the rest of the lesson.

Part one: the passage

From a story published in 1897 by Kate Chopin.

Little Mrs. Sommers one day found herself the unexpected possessor of fifteen dollars. It seemed to her a very large amount of money, and the way in which it stuffed and bulged her worn old porte-monnaie gave her a feeling of importance such as she had not enjoyed for years.

The question of investment was one that occupied her greatly. For a day or two she walked about apparently in a dreamy state, but really absorbed in speculation and calculation. She did not wish to act hastily, to do anything she might afterward regret.

A dollar or two should be added to the price usually paid for Janie's shoes, which would insure their lasting an appreciable time longer than they usually did. She would buy so and so many yards of percale for new shirt waists for the boys and Janie and Mag. She had intended to make the old ones do by skilful patching. ... The vision of her little brood looking fresh and dainty and new for once in their lives excited her and made her restless and wakeful with anticipation.

The neighbors sometimes talked of certain "better days" that little Mrs. Sommers had known before she had ever thought of being Mrs. Sommers. She herself indulged in no such morbid retrospection. She had no time, no second of time to devote to the past. The needs of the present absorbed her every faculty. A vision of the future like some dim, gaunt monster sometimes appalled her, but luckily to-morrow never comes.

But that day she was a little faint and tired. She had swallowed a light luncheon, no! when she came to think of it, between getting the children fed and the place righted, and preparing herself for the shopping bout, she had actually forgotten to eat any luncheon at all!

The six questions:

1. The word "investment" in the second paragraph is chiefly notable because it
2. The repeated use of "little" before Mrs. Sommers's name serves mainly to
3. The third paragraph's list of purchases characterises Mrs. Sommers primarily as someone who
4. The phrase "but luckily to-morrow never comes" is best read as
5. The exclamation "no!" in the final paragraph most clearly signals
6. The passage's tone toward Mrs. Sommers is best described as

Part one: the answers

1. It applies the vocabulary of finance to fifteen dollars, so a sum too small to invest is being handled with the seriousness of capital. The joke is affectionate and it is also the point: she has no practice at spending on herself.

2. The narrator uses "little" four times in five paragraphs, and never about her body. It shrinks her, and it does so in the narrator's voice, not the neighbours'. A distractor claiming it reflects other characters' condescension is the trap.

3. Everything on the list is for somebody else. Shoes for Janie, percale for the boys, a gown for Mag, caps and hats. Her own name does not appear in her own plan.

4. Free indirect speech, and bitter. "Luckily" is her word, not the narrator's judgement, and it means that the only comfort available is not thinking. An option calling it optimistic misses that the future has just been described as a gaunt monster.

5. The narration has slipped fully into her mind: the correction happens as she thinks it, mid-sentence. It also supplies the physical fact that will drive the rest of the story, which is that she has not eaten.

6. Sympathetic and faintly ironic together. Not mocking, since her self-denial is treated as real; not sentimental, since the prose keeps noticing what she is doing to herself.

Key idea: Every one of those six was settled inside the passage, and three of them turned on a single word.

Part two: Question 1

Here is a sonnet by Christina Rossetti, published in 1862.

Remember me when I am gone away,
Gone far away into the silent land;
When you can no more hold me by the hand,
Nor I half turn to go yet turning stay.
Remember me when no more day by day
You tell me of our future that you planned:
Only remember me; you understand
It will be late to counsel then or pray.
Yet if you should forget me for a while
And afterwards remember, do not grieve:
For if the darkness and corruption leave
A vestige of the thoughts that once I had,
Better by far you should forget and smile
Than that you should remember and be sad.

The prompt: In the poem above, a dying speaker addresses someone she will leave behind. Read the poem carefully. Then, in a well-written essay, analyse how the poem's structure and language convey the complexity of the speaker's attitude toward being remembered. Do not merely summarise the poem.

Forty minutes. Write it before you read on.

The model response

The poem is an instruction that spends its last six lines cancelling itself. Three times in the octave the speaker gives an order, "Remember me", "Remember me", "Only remember me", and each is placed at the head of its clause where a command belongs. Then line nine begins "Yet", and the sonnet's turn withdraws the order: forget, if forgetting is easier. What looks like generosity is a second and larger act of control, because a listener told to remember can disobey, while a listener told that either choice is permitted has been left no way to fail.

The language of the octave keeps the fact of dying at one remove. She goes "far away into the silent land", a phrase that describes a journey rather than an end, and the physical detail she chooses is not illness but a gesture: "Nor I half turn to go yet turning stay", which catches a body caught between leaving and not, and which is the only moment in the poem where she is doing anything at all. Everything else she does is issue instructions. So when the sestet finally names the thing directly, "the darkness and corruption", the plainness lands hard, and it lands one line before she tells him to smile.

The form does the same work as the vocabulary. The octave rhymes exactly and repeats its two sounds eight times, which makes it sound settled, even legal. The sestet loosens, and where an English sonnet would snap shut on a closing couplet, Rossetti gives the last two lines rhymes borrowed from earlier in the sestet, so the poem stops without clicking. That withheld click matters, because the final sentence is still a comparison, "Better by far", and still an instruction about what he should feel. The speaker never stops arranging him. The cost of reading the poem this way is that it makes a famously tender ending cold, and a reader who hears only kindness in "do not grieve" is hearing something the words do support; but the poem is composed entirely of imperatives, and its last one asks to be disobeyed, which is the one order that cannot be carried out.

How the model scores

Note what the model does not do. It does not have an introduction. It never uses the words "imagery", "tone", "diction" or "Petrarchan". It quotes nothing longer than eight words. And it is about four hundred words, which is what forty minutes buys when every sentence is working.

Two more prompts, to be done later

Question 2. Read the Chopin passage above again in full. Analyse how Chopin uses narration and detail to convey Mrs. Sommers's relationship to her own needs.

Question 3. In many works of literature a character is given something they had not expected and cannot easily use. Choose a work of fiction or drama in which this occurs, and analyse how it contributes to an interpretation of the work as a whole.

Self-scoring checklist

• Row A: Underline your thesis. Could a careful reader disagree with it? If not, score 0.
• Row B, first test: Count your quotations. Now count how many are followed by a sentence explaining what they do. If the second number is smaller, your honest score is 2 or 3.
• Row B, second test: Put "therefore" between your claims. If only "also" fits, you have a list.
• Row B, third test: Do you show two different techniques contributing to the same claim? If not, 4 is out of reach.
• Row C: Point at the sentence that names a tension or a cost. If you cannot point at one, score 0 and do not argue with yourself.

Common misconceptions

• More practice essays make you better. Writing ten unscored essays entrenches whatever you already do. One essay scored honestly against the rows is worth five that are not.
• A model response should be imitated sentence by sentence. Copy the moves, not the voice: short quotation, immediate explanation, claims that depend on each other.
• You should sound like a critic. The model uses no technical vocabulary at all and scores six. Precision is what is being rewarded, not register.

What you now know

• Multiple-choice answers live inside the passage, often inside a single word.
• A poem's turn is where the thesis usually is, and in this sonnet it is the word "Yet".
• Form and diction pulling in the same direction is what a four-point Row B looks like.
• An essay needs no introduction, no device names, and no quotation longer than a line.
• Naming what your reading costs is the cheapest reliable route to the sixth point.
• Worth holding on to: score your own work against the rows, honestly, or the practice was only typing.

Sources

1. Rossetti, C. (1862). Remember. In Goblin Market, The Prince's Progress, and Other Poems. Macmillan. Full text at Project Gutenberg, gutenberg.org.
2. Chopin, K. (1897). A pair of silk stockings. In The Awakening, and Selected Short Stories. Full text at Project Gutenberg, gutenberg.org.
3. College Board. (n.d.). AP past exam questions and scoring guidelines. AP Central. apcentral.collegeboard.org.
4. College Board. (2019). AP English Literature and Composition: Course and exam description (pp. 171-190, free-response scoring rubrics). College Board.
5. Arp, T. R., & Johnson, G. (2018). Perrine's Literature: Structure, Sound, and Sense (13th ed.). Cengage Learning.