问答题
Read the following poem and fulfill the tasks.(20 points)Touch it; it won"t shrink like an eyeball, This egg-shaped bailiwick, clear as a tear.Here"s yesterday, last year—Palm-spear and lily distinct as flora in the vastWindless threadwork of a tapestry.Flick the glass with your fingernail:It will ping like a Chinese chime in the slightest air stirThough nobody in there looks up or bothers to answer.The inhabitants are light as cork,Every one of them permanently busy.At their feet, the sea waves bow in single file.Never trespassing in bad temper;Stalling in midair,Short-reined, pawing like paradeground horses.Overhead, the clouds sit tasseled and fancyAs Victorian cushions. This familyOf valentine faces might please a collector:They ring true, like good china.Elsewhere the landscape is more frank.The light fails without letup, blindingly.A woman is dragging her shadow in a circleAbout a bald hospital saucer.It resembles the moon, or a sheet of blank paperAnd appears to have suffered a sort of private blitzkrieg.She lives quietlyWith no attachments, like a foetus in a bottle,The obsolete house, the sea; flattened to a pictureShe has one too many dimensions to enter.Grief and anger, exorcised,Leave her alone now.The future is a grey seagullTattling in its cat-voice of departure.Age and terror, like nurses, attend her,And a drowned man, complaining of the great cold,Crawls up out of the sea.
问答题
Identify its author(2 points);
【正确答案】正确答案：The author of this poem is Sylvia Plath.
【答案解析】
问答题
Try to give it a suitable title(3 points);
【正确答案】正确答案：The original title of this poem is A Life. I would like to title this poem as Pain or Picture, because the author describes a picture she sees and this poem also tells the readers her painful and depressed feeling.
【答案解析】
问答题
Write a short essay to discuss its thematic concerns.(15 points)
【正确答案】正确答案：In this poem, the speaker is staring at a picture of the seaside. The comparison between the beauty and constancy in the picture and the pain and ugliness of the reality implies the speaker"s fear of the future and change. At the beginning of the poem, she envies the life portrayed in the painting because it is so easily controlled " at their feet the waves bow in single file". The time is also still in the painting as "here"s yesterday, last year" and the waves are " stalling in midair". Even the family in the painting all has good-looking faces. This detached way of living appeals to the speaker. Compared with the painting, the speaker"s real life or " elsewhere the landscape is more frank" is filled with grief, anger and loneliness. The poem reflects the speaker"s fear for growing old.