Hearing whose voice carries the images

English · Reading Comprehension · ages 15-16

Name ______________________ Date ____________

A poem says the speaker's 'boots crunch on frozen grass'. What does this image do?
- It lets the reader hear and feel a cold morning
- It states the poem's whole message directly in plain words
- It shows that the speaker must be the poet
A poem is written in the voice of an old lighthouse keeper. The poet is nineteen. Who is the speaker?
- The poet, because every poem is about the person who wrote it
- The keeper, a voice the poet invented for the poem
- The reader, because the reader says the lines aloud
If a poem says 'I', the speaker must be the poet.
Circle one: True False
In a poem full of birdsong and warm bread, one line shows a padlocked door. How should you treat that image?
- Ask what worry the odd image brings into the poem
- Ignore it, since one line cannot change a whole poem
- Count it as one more gentle detail in the list
Light returns in every stanza of a hopeful poem, growing stronger each time. What is the image doing?
- Repeating the same detail because the poet ran out of ideas
- Describing the weather on the day the poem was written
- Building hope stanza by stanza without stating it
Why draw a line joining each appearance of a repeating image?
- To check that the poem keeps a regular rhyme
- To mark how many lines each stanza has
- To see what the image gathers as it returns
Imagine a war poem told by a pilot overhead instead of a child in the street below. What does that swap show?
- Images stay exactly the same no matter who is speaking
- A poem only works when the poet and the speaker are the same
- The speaker decides which images matter and how
A critic says a poem's stanzas about a sailor lost at sea prove the poet once nearly drowned. What is the flaw?
- It treats the speaker's voice as the poet's own life
- It ignores how many stanzas and lines the poem contains
- It reads the sea as a real sea, not an image

Answer key

For grown-ups. Fold this page away before handing over the rest.

Hearing whose voice carries the images W1-mt_RYvng3ESeS-s1

It lets the reader hear and feel a cold morning · Images are word pictures for the senses. Crunching boots and frozen grass let you hear and feel the cold without the poem saying 'it was cold'.
The keeper, a voice the poet invented for the poem · The voice in the poem is an old keeper, while the poet is nineteen. The keeper is a speaker the poet invented.
False · The 'I' belongs to the speaker, a voice the poet may invent. Without outside evidence, call it the speaker.
Ask what worry the odd image brings into the poem · An image that clashes with the rest often points to what the poem is really worried about, so analyse it rather than skip it.
Building hope stanza by stanza without stating it · Each return adds strength to the light, so the image builds the poem's hope without any line stating it.
To see what the image gathers as it returns · Joining each return of an image shows how it changes and what it gathers across the poem.
The speaker decides which images matter and how · The same war looks different from the air and from the street. Swapping the speaker changes which images matter, so the voice shapes the images.
It treats the speaker's voice as the poet's own life · A speaker's experiences belong to the poem's voice. They do not prove facts about the poet's life without outside evidence.