This practice test, at the Spark Notes site, is worthwhile for practice and diagnostic purposes. I’d recommend taking the time to do it.
Remember, it’s time to start reviewing your terms, working on your openings, and spending a few minutes each night preparing. Hey, how about that novel review wiki, too?
go out tied down,
deaf to the voice requiring now acknowledgement,
something, some recognition.
Tied down, yes, tied, and deaf to it.
In such a death there is no ending, none,
and no resolve.
Only lapses like a wheel, forgetfulness.
Who touches the ache touches numbness against relief.
It is remembering with happy tears the worst of winters!
Such halls of want these luckless truths build!
Who can help but love them who taught restraint,
a stone lesson
to endure silence like an excess of suffering
until such suffering to love spills into dreams—
oh, when to hold, when not to hold them,
when not to meet their eyes.
What’s chosen earnestly, by faith,
may be used in time against us.
Who can say how many or how few are buried in us.
* An aubade is a poem or song about lovers who must leave one another in the early hours of the morning.
We romped until the pans
Slid from the kitchen shelf;
My mother’s countenance
Could not unfrown itself.
The hand that held my wrist
Was battered on one knuckle;
At every step you missed
My right ear scraped a buckle.
You beat time on my head
With a palm caked hard by dirt,
Then waltzed me off to bed
Still clinging to your shirt.
I want to talk about the sadness
of old clothes in the flea market,
and the tongues lost in tiny children;
I want to talk about the woman
who said she would meet me
at the theater and the part of me
that still waits for her; I want
to talk about how bullies
hurt the sweet heart, how
the heart walks in sleep, how
the heart hides in the clock,
hides in the hands of strangers;
I want to talk about this:
the wedding dress that poetry wore
one morning in the apple trees
so long ago, when she came to me,
innocent, distressed, and lovely.
She wore a dress based upon the principle
of the daffodil: puffed sleeves,
inflated bodice, profusion
of frills along the shoulder blades
and hemline.
A dress based upon the principle of girl
as flower; everything unfolding, spilling
outward and downward: ribbon, stole,
corsage, sash.
It was the only thing I was ever
elected. A very short king.
I wore a bow tie, and felt
like a third-grader.
Even the scent of the daffodils you left
reminds me. It was a spring night.
And escorting her down the runway
was a losing battle, trying to march
down among the full, thick folds
of crinoline, into the barrage of her
father’s flashbulbs, wading
the backwash of her mother’s
perfume: scared, smiling,
tiny, down at the end
of that long, thin, Audrey Hepburn arm,
where I was king.