Lullaby

Question 1

What rhymes does he mostly use?

Answer 1

slant rhymes

Question 2

Auden’s rhyme scheme in Lullaby is mostly using ____ rhymes, contrasting with the largely regular meter

Answer 2

slant

Question 3

What meter is it?

Answer 3

Trochaic tetrameter

Question 4

Auden mainly uses ____ to mimic the soothing sound and rhythm of Children’s songs

Answer 4

Trochaic tetrameter

Question 5

When was Lullaby written?

Answer 5

1937

Question 6

“Beauty, ___, vision dies”

Answer 6

Midnight

Question 7

In 1972 he addressed himself in a poem called ‘A Lullaby’….

Answer 7

where instead of talking to a sleeping lover, the poem is a tacit preparation for death.

Question 8

‘nights of insult let you pass/ watched by every human love’

Answer 8

despite its realistic outlook on mortality, it is a potent expression of the hope for timeless and profound love that extends beyond a single life.

Question 9

rhyme scheme?

Answer 9

no consistant rhyme scheme and many metrical variations

Question 10

Zsusza Rawlinson writes that it is

Answer 10

‘justly famous, melodiously lyrical, and incantorial’

Question 11

stanza pattern?

Answer 11

four ten lined stanzas

Question 12

mostly unrhymed but with regular patterns:

Answer 12

lines 3 and 7 of each stanza rhyme

Question 13

what is the pattern?

Answer 13

ABCBADCEED (perhaps hidden message in rhyme scheme, bad seed referring to his illicit love)

Question 14

it is a sincere confession of _____ that goes unheard by the sleeping beloved

Answer 14

faithlessness

Question 15

what do the trochaic metres enact?

Answer 15

The dying fall of a relationship whose true nature had to be kept secret but whose inequalities are implicit as the conscious speaker gazes upon the sleeping, silent lover

Question 16

each stanza consists of….

Answer 16

one sentence

Question 17

the second stanza opens with the kind of ______ lie, encountered in _____.

Answer 17

expansive, love lyrics

Question 18

the _____ adjective ‘human’ to the noun ‘head’ is ______ and placed in a prominent position at the beginning of the second line in order to defeat expectation

Answer 18

pejorative, suspended

Question 19

unusual collocation?

Answer 19

‘faithless arm’

Question 20

patterning has the paradoxical potentiality of enhancing the sense of the fragility of human relationships while…

Answer 20

at the same time tacitly suggesting the miracle that they survive at all in such uncompromising circumstances

Question 21

why are the circumstances uncompromising

Answer 21

the noons are dry ad barren, the ‘powers’ are summed up as being ‘involuntary’ in their aid, the nights are an ‘insult’

Question 22

Edward Mendelson on ‘faithless arm’ in this poem. it is

Answer 22

‘the first English poem in which a lover proclaims, in moral terms and during a shared night of love, his own faithlessness’

Question 23

‘love’ is rhymed with

Answer 23

‘grave’

Question 24

‘ephemeral’ is rhymed with

Answer 24

‘beautiful’

Question 25

‘Certainty, fidelity/ On the stroke of midnight pass’

Answer 25

vocabulary of universals, rather than affirming Love’s everlastingness, asserts the reverse.

Question 26

‘the hermit’s carnal ecstasy’

Answer 26

abstruse image; interps include Auden’s allusion to the isolation. of homosexuals during the era he was writing, or the ability for even a hermit to be affected by the pangs of love

Question 27

‘soul and body have no bounds’

Answer 27

the abstract and the physical is crossed by lovers mistaking the ‘ordinary swoon’ of orgasm for evidence of ‘universal love and hope’ and by hermits whose ‘abstract insight’ induces self-mortification, a perverse type of ‘carnal ecstasy’

Question 28

‘but from this night’…..

Answer 28

speaker on the brink of lying as this might introduce his assurance of unfading devotion, but its actually a re-intensification of focus on the passing instant.

Question 29

‘Beauty, midnight, vision dies’

Answer 29

the singular verb ‘dies’ enforces sequence, not simultaneity; that night becomes this disenchanting day

Question 30

what did the first stanza suggestively rhyme ‘lie’ with?

Answer 30

‘me’

Question 31

what do the last dissonant imagery and open rhymes (‘enough’/’love’; ‘powers’/’pass’) hint at?

Answer 31

insufficiency; in a state of ‘dryness’ water is more needful than food. ‘involuntary powers’ seem unreliable substitutes for willed assistance so the anticipated absence on the speaker’s part is glaring.

Question 32

Mendelson notes his hope that ‘________’ will provide what he will not

Answer 32

some vaguer source

Question 33

Christ biblically endured ‘noons of dryness’ and ‘nights of insult….

Answer 33

the parallel might indicate the extent of desertion and betrayal this dreamer should expect

Question 34

It’s a poem of….

Answer 34

disenchantment

Question 35

Lullaby addresses language of continuing ______ to an unhearing partner

Answer 35

affection

Question 36

Mean streets replace the bed’s safe haven to indicate the inevitable ______.

Answer 36

sundering

Question 37

its final vision of ‘love’ denotes no transcendent generality, but individualised examples, rather as if….

Answer 37

the words ‘type of’ preceded ‘human’

Question 38

Bozworth: the poem CANNOT be read as if

Answer 38

‘the conditions under which heterosexual and homosexual love experienced are the same’

Question 39

Hoggart calls it _____ rather than sensuous; in other words nearer to Pope than Keats

Answer 39

moral

Question 40

the title is deceptive; a sleeping person needs no lullaby, and here actually receives a poem about a _____ _______.

Answer 40

rude awakening