Instructions
Answer the following exam question and support your interpretation with evidence gained from a close reading of the text. Make sure to identify and analyze the author’s use of literary devices.
Your
final exam should be a multi-paragraph essay that follows the
conventions of standard English grammar and usage, as well as MLA
in-text citation rules for the quotation of literary works.
POEM 1 Source 1
Gardening
By Rhina P. Espaillat
My hands are in the dirt, ten fingernails
black with it, and half-worms come up to writhe
in the hole I’ve made with a rusty trowel.
I nudge them out, drop them where shade is deeper
and moister: “Nothing to be alarmed about,”5
I tell them. “There’s enough dirt for us all.”
Roots from our neighbor’s greedy birch, caught on
the wrong side of the fence, drop their booty
of damp clumps from black sweaty little fists.
I pat them back under, dig a new hole.10
“If I don’t see you I don’t know you’re there,”
I tell them. “Do as much for me someday.”
With my hands in this dirt I’m on good terms
with everything but weeds, polite even
with them: “Sorry,” I tell the creamy fuzz15
bursting from the dandelion’s pursed lip,
“Nothing personal, you’re just out of place.”
And I pry it loose like a bad habit.
Any dirt at all will lead you into
every grave you can think of, with a stick20
long enough and time enough for digging.
I reach down deep for my mother’s mother,
show her tomato buds, stroke her to sleep
promising her, at least, enough to eat.
And listen, my father’s mother—midwife25
and singer of poems, that champion laugher
whose fat roses scented my early days—
under my nails, wherever I dig, still
laughing. I tell her I sing roses too,
my hands in dirt where she lives forever.30
Citation:
Espaillat, Rhina P. “Gardening” Poetry, vol. 164, no. 3, 1994, pp. 141–141, http://www.jstor.org/stable/20604021. Accessed 28 Apr. 2022.
2
POem 2 source 2 ( Walt witmans song of myself )
Instructions
Answer the following exam question and support your interpretation