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.