陶洁《美国文学选读》课后习题详解(20世纪美国诗人(2))【圣才出品】

第22单元20世纪美国诗人（2）

Robert Lowell

1. The poem’s title is “Skunk Hour,” what is the implication of this title?

Key: The implication of this title is that people in the modern American society are driven by strong desires for wealth and fame. The modern time becomes the time of desires and lust, in which people are like skunks, searching for money and profit, the dirty and unspiritual things.

2. Does the society appear normal in the narrator’s eye?

Key: No, the socie ty does not appear normal in the narrator’s eye. Actually, it appears abnormal in the eye of the narrator. The narrator himself becomes uneasy, uncomfortable and sick in such an abnormal society.

3. What is the reaction of the narrator when he hears the music from the car radio? Key: The narrator becomes sick and his ill-spirit sob in each blood sell as if his hands were at its throat, and he himself is like the hell with no one there.

Elizabeth Bishop

1. How old was the poet when she visited the dentist’s waiting room in Worcester, Massachusetts in 1918?

Key: She would be seven years old after three days.

2. Is there any relationship between the painful cry of her aunt and the date on the cover of the National Geographic?

Key: The date on the cover of the National Geographic was February, 1918, on which the WWI was underway. Therefore, the whole world was suffering from war, pain and death. Here, the painful cry of her aunt symbolizes the anguished cry of the whole world.

3. What does the narrator find out with a surprise?

Key: The narrator surprisingly finds out the painful cry of her aunt is hers, and she becomes her aunt.

4. Why does she identify herself with her aunt and others?

Key: Because she has realized that she would be like them one day when she grow up and go through what they were going through at that time. She and her aunt along with the others are the same human beings. She herself was only one part of them.

5. Whom does the narrator refer to as “you” in the second stanza?

Key: The narrator refers to herself. She was saying to herself in her heart.

6. Why does she feel so strange at that moment?

Key: Because she thought that she would grow up and go through everything that she was seeing, and as if she was going through in person at that time. She couldn’t distinguish reality from her imagination and t houghts. She felt very strange.

7. The brightly-lit waiting room forms a sharp contrast with the dark and old night outside. What symbolic meaning do you think the dark night might have? Key: The dark night might symbolize the suffering world at war and also the cruel reality that the adult have to deal with.

Theodore Roethke

1. How do you explain the paradox of “I wake to sleep”?

Key: It means that when “I” wake up, “I” am still in sleep, because in “my” mind, reality and dreams are the same. In some way, reality is like dream, which is not real and tangible. For “me”, they have no difference at all.

2. What does Great Nature have to do with the reader?

Key: Great Nature has many mysteries that we cannot explain, but it generously provides valuable resources for us, such as lively air that we need.

3. Please explain the meaning of the sentence: “What falls away is always”.