Boot Camp Worksheet

All questions below refer to the title as well as the text of the poem or story in question. Where necessary, support and explain your answers.

Click here for the poems mentioned below.

1. What is the plot of "The Anniversary"?
   
2. How important is setting in that poem?
   
3. "[T]ogether we can blast another hole in ourselves without a sound" : what type of image occurs here?
   
4. Where do you see (or rather "hear") an aural image?
   
5. Identify an instance of irony in the poem.
   
6. Briefly discuss language in the poem.
   
7. What is the poem's point of view, and how is it significant?
   
8. True or False: the theme of "The Anniversary" is: choose your spouse carefully!
   
9. What is the plot of "Traveling Through the Dark"?
   
10. "The car aimed ahead its lowered parking lights": how is this image significant?
    
11. Identify an instance of meaningful ambiguity in that poem.
    
12. Describe plot structure in the film version of The Wizard of Oz.
    
13. Identify an example of ambiguity in that story.
    
14. What visual image in that story has been appropriated by the culture at large? ("Appropriated": look it up.)
    
15. Describe Dorothy's character, and how it's revealed.
    
16. Describe plot structure in Tim O'Brien's "How to Tell a True War Story."
    
17. Discuss speech idiom in that story.
    
18. "[T]he purply black glow of napalm": identify the literary element operating here, including its type.
    
19. Identify a figurative image in "To a Blossoming Pear Tree."
    
20. Describe tone in the first stanza of that poem.
    

 

 

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