2006B FRQ #1

Post date: Dec 04, 2013 4:22:23 PM

(Suggested time—40 minutes. This question counts as one-third of the total essay section score.) 

Read the following poem carefully. Then write an essay discussing how the poet uses literary techniques to reveal the speaker’s attitudes toward nature and the artist’s task.

To Paint a Water Lily 

A green level of lily leaves 

Roofs the pond’s chamber and paves

The flies’ furious arena: study 

These, the two minds of this lady.

5 First observe the air’s dragonfly 

That eats meat, that bullets by 

Or stands in space to take aim; 

Others as dangerous comb the hum

Under the trees. There are battle-shouts

10 And death-cries everywhere hereabouts

But inaudible, so the eyes praise 

To see the colours of these flies 

Rainbow their arcs, spark, or settle

Cooling like beads of molten metal

15 Through the spectrum. Think what worse 

Is the pond-bed’s matter of course;

Prehistoric bedragonned times 

Crawl that darkness with Latin names, 

Have evolved no improvements there, 

20 Jaws for heads, the set stare, 

Ignorant of age as of hour— 

Now paint the long-necked lily-flower 

Which, deep in both worlds, can be still 

As a painting, trembling hardly at all 

25 Though the dragonfly alight, 

Whatever horror nudge her root. 

— “To Paint a Water Lily” from Collected Poems by Ted Hughes (1930–1998),  published by Faber and Faber Ltd [www.faber.co.uk]. Reprinted by permission of the publisher.