(The following topics would be appropriate for practicing the third of the free response essays, which—when I was teaching AP Language and Composition at the end of the last century (!)—asks students to explore and take a position on a topic introduced in one or more quotations.)

Essay I

Read the following two passages carefully and explore the views of innocence presented in each. Do contemporary Americans share these views? Draw on your own experience and reading in discussing the second part of the question. The first passage is a poem by William Blake from his Songs of Innocence and Experience, 1789; the second, an excerpt from Melville’s Billy Budd.

The Sick Rose

O Rose thou art sick.

The invisible worm,

That flies in the night In the Howling storm:

Has found out thy bed Of crimson joy: And his dark secret love Does thy life destroy.

. . . the master-at-arms was perhaps the only man in the ship intellectually capable of adequately appreciating the moral phenomenon presented in Billy Budd. And the insight but intensified his passion, which assuming various secret forms within him, at times assumed that of cynic disdain, disdain of innocence--to be nothing more than innocent! Yet in an aesthetic way he saw the charm of it, the courageous free-and-easy temper of it, and fain would have shared it, but he despaired of it.

Essay II

Assuredly we bring not innocence into the world, we bring impurity much rather; that which purifies us is trial, and trial is by what is contrary.

--John Milton, Areopagitica

Why, you simple creatures, the weakest of all weak things is a virtue which has not been tested in the fire.

--from the Stranger’s Post-Script,

Mark Twain, “The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg”

Writing more than two centuries apart on different occasions, Milton and Twain define virtuous behavior in much the same terms. Using evidence from your personal experience or reading, write a carefully reasoned persuasive essay that defends, challenges, or qualifies their assertions about the nature of virtue. Be sure to explain Milton’s and Twain’s views before or while developing your own argument.

Essay III

[Captain Vere’s] settled convictions were as a dike against those invading waters of novel opinion social, political, and otherwise, which carried away as in a torrent no few minds in those days, minds not inferior to his own. While other members of that aristocracy to which by birth he belonged were incensed at the innovators mainly because their theories were inimical to the privileged classes, Captain Vere disinterestedly opposed them not alone because they seemed to him insusceptible of embodiment in lasting institutions, but at war with the peace of the world and the true welfare of mankind.

--Herman Melville, Billy Budd

As described here, Melville’s Captain Vere epitomizes the classic conservative position on “novel opinion.” Write a well-organized expository essay in which you explore that position as it is expressed in this passage and (to some extent) in the story as a whole, as well as in other examples from contemporary society or history.

(Clearly, this topic was keyed to the study of Melville’s novella in class, whereas Essays I and II require analysis of the quotations alone.)