2007B FRQ #1

Post date: Dec 04, 2013 4:35:17 PM

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

Read the following poem carefully. Then, write a well-organized essay in which you analyze the techniques the poet uses to convey his attitude toward the places he describes.

Here 

                                                                Swerving east, from rich industrial shadows 

                                                                And traffic all night north; swerving through fields 

                                                                Too thin and thistled to be called meadows, 

                                                                And now and then a harsh-named halt, that shields 

                                                                5 Workmen at dawn; swerving to solitude

                                                                Of skies and scarecrows, haystacks, hares and pheasants, 

                                                                And the widening river’s slow presence,

                                                                The piled gold clouds, the shining gull-marked mud, 

                                                                Gathers to the surprise of a large town:

                                                                10 Here domes and statues, spires and cranes cluster 

                                                                Beside grain-scattered streets, barge-crowded water, 

                                                                And residents from raw estates, brought down 

                                                                The dead straight miles by stealing flat-faced trolleys, 

                                                                Push through plate-glass swing doors to their desires— 

                                                                15 Cheap suits, red kitchen-ware, sharp shoes, iced lollies, 

                                                                Electric mixers, toasters, washers, driers— 

                                                                A cut-price crowd, urban yet simple, dwelling 

                                                                Where only salesmen and relations come 

                                                                Within a terminate and fishy-smelling

                                                                20 Pastoral of ships up streets, the slave museum, 

                                                                Tattoo-shops, consulates, grim head-scarfed wives; 

                                                                And out beyond its mortgaged half-built edges 

                                                                Fast-shadowed wheat-fields, running high as hedges, 

                                                                Isolate villages, where removed lives

                                                                25 Loneliness clarifies. Here silence stands 

                                                                Like heat. Here leaves unnoticed thicken, 

                                                                Hidden weeds flower, neglected waters quicken, 

                                                                Luminously-peopled air ascends; 

                                                                And past the poppies bluish neutral distance 

                                                                30 Ends the land suddenly beyond a beach 

                                                                Of shapes and shingle. Here is unfenced existence: 

                                                                Facing the sun, untalkative, out of reach.

                                                                (1964) 

“Here” from COLLECTED POEMS by Philip Larkin. Copyright © 1988, 1989 by the Estate of Philip Larkin. Reprinted by permission of The Society of Authors as the Literary Representative of the Estate of Philip Larkin.