2007 FRQ #1

Post date: Dec 04, 2013 4:46:10 PM

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

In the following two poems, adults provide explanations for children. Read the poems carefully. Then write an essay in which you compare and contrast the two poems, analyzing how each poet uses literary devices to make his point.

A Barred Owl

The History Teacher

The warping night air having brought the boom

Of an owl’s voice into her darkened room,

We tell the wakened child that all she heard

Was an odd question from a forest bird,

5 Asking of us, if rightly listened to,

“Who cooks for you?” and then “Who cooks for you?”

Words, which can make our terrors bravely clear,

Can also thus domesticate a fear,

And send a small child back to sleep at night

10 Not listening for the sound of stealthy flight

Or dreaming of some small thing in a claw

Borne up to some dark branch and eaten raw.

—Richard Wilbur

Trying to protect his students’ innocence

he told them the Ice Age was really just

the Chilly Age, a period of a million years

when everyone had to wear sweaters.

5 And the Stone Age became the Gravel Age,

named after the long driveways of the time.

The Spanish Inquisition was nothing more

than an outbreak of questions such as

“How far is it from here to Madrid?”

10 “What do you call the matador’s hat?”

The War of the Roses took place in a garden,

and the Enola Gay* dropped one tiny atom

on Japan.

The children would leave his classroom

15 for the playground to torment the weak

and the smart,

mussing up their hair and breaking their glasses,

while he gathered up his notes and walked home

past flower beds and white picket fences,

20 wondering if they would believe that soldiers

in the Boer War told long, rambling stories

designed to make the enemy nod off.

—Billy Collins

*The name of the airplane from which an atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, Japan, in 1945.