ENG 207 Final, Spring 2005

English 207 Final Examination Spring 2005 Choose four of the following prompts and respond to them in your examination booklet. Please write in complete sentences, and make your answers as clear and concise as possible. Each answer should be between one and two pages in length, no longer. Also, please indicate the number of the prompt to which you are responding, at the beginning of each response. Don’t forget to write your name on your examination booklet. 1. How did writers’ views on human nature and/or free will change throughout the three periods we’ ve studied in this course? Give at least one brief example from each period, to support your claims. 2. Explain at least two ways in which writers of the Modern period reacted against the mainstream beliefs of the Victorian period? Give at least one brief example from each of the two periods, to support your claims. 3. Compare the theories of T.S. Eliot, Oscar Wilde, and William Wordsworth, as they pertain to the roles and responsibilities of. writers. 4. Read the following poem and explain who wrote it and which stage of his or her career it represents, supplying stylistic and thematic evidence for your answer. “Leda and the Swan” A sudden blow: the great wings beating still Above the staggering girl, her thighs caressed By the dark webs, her nape caught in his bill, He holds her helpless breast upon his breast. How can those terrified vague fingers push The feathered glory from her loosening thighs? And how can body, laid in that white rush, But feel the strange heart beating where it lies? A shudder in the loins engenders there The broken wall, the burning roof and tower And Agamemnon dead. Being so caught up, So mastered by the brute blood of the air, Did she put on his knowledge with his power Before the indifferent beak could let her drop? 5. Read the following terminal stanza from the poem “Bavarian Gentians,” and explain who wrote it, and how you know, based on the style and/or theme. Reach me a gentian, give me a torch let me guide myself with the blue, forked torch of this flower down the darker and darker stairs, where blue is darkened on blueness. even where Persephone goes, just now, from the frosted September to the sightless realm where darkness was awake upon the dark and Persephone herself is but a voice or a darkness invisible enfolded in the deeper dark of the arms Plutonic, and pierced with the passion of dense gloom, among the splendour of torches of darkness, shedding darkness on the lost bride and her groom. met