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Today students tested out several strategies for reading and analyzing poetry. Students received the following prompt which is from the 2008 exam (form b): (Suggested time—40 minutes. This question counts as one-third of the total essay section score.) The following two poems present animal-eye views of the world. Read each poem carefully. Then write an essay in which you analyze the techniques used in the poems to characterize the speakers and convey differing views of the world. HAWK ROOSTING I sit in the top of the wood, my eyes closed. Inaction, no falsifying dream Between my hooked head and hooked feet: Or in sleep rehearse perfect kills and eat. 5 The convenience of the high trees! The air’s buoyancy and the sun’s ray Are of advantage to me; And the earth’s face upward for my inspection. My feet are locked upon the rough bark. 10 It took the whole of Creation To produce my foot, my each feather: Now I hold Creation in my foot Or fly up, and revolve it all slowly— I kill where I please because it is all mine. 15 There is no sophistry in my body: My manners are tearing off heads— The allotment of death. For the one path of my flight is direct Through the bones of the living. 20 No arguments assert my right: The sun is behind me. Nothing has changed since I began. My eye has permitted no change. I am going to keep things like this. —Ted Hughes From Lupercal, by Ted Hughes. Faber & Faber Ltd., 1960. GOLDEN RETRIEVALS Fetch? Balls and sticks capture my attention seconds at a time. Catch? I don’t think so. Bunny, tumbling leaf, a squirrel who’s—oh joy—actually scared. Sniff the wind, then 5 I’m off again: muck, pond, ditch, residue of any thrillingly dead thing. And you? Either you’re sunk in the past, half our walk, thinking of what you never can bring back, or else you’re off in some fog concerning 10 —tomorrow, is that what you call it? My work: to unsnare time’s warp (and woof!), retrieving, my haze-headed friend, you. This shining bark, a Zen master’s bronzy gong, calls you here, entirely, now: bow-wow, bow-wow, bow-wow. —Mark Doty Copyright © 1998 by Mark Doty. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers, Inc.