Poe's poem opens, "Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered, weak and weary, / Over many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore." Who is speaking these lines?

Dickinson's speaker says, "I'm nobody! Who are you? / Are you nobody, too? ... How dreary to be somebody! / How public, like a frog." What does the excerpt show about the speaker?

Owen's poem begins, "Bent double, like old beggars under sacks, / Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge, / Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs." What does this show about the speaker?

One of Keats's odes begins, "Thou still unravish'd bride of quietness, / Thou foster-child of silence and slow time, / Sylvan historian ..." Whom or what is the speaker addressing?

Whitman's speaker says, "Here Captain! dear father! / This arm beneath your head! / It is some dream that on the deck, / You've fallen cold and dead." What does the excerpt show about the speaker?

In Frost's "Mending Wall" the speaker says, "Something there is that doesn't love a wall," and later reports, "He only says, 'Good fences make good neighbors.'" Whose view about fences is that?

Housman opens, "The time you won your town the race / We chaired you through the market-place," then: "To-day, the road all runners come, / Shoulder-high we bring you home." Where does the poem turn?

Whitman's speaker lists, "When I heard the learn'd astronomer, / When the proofs, the figures, were ranged in columns before me ..." then, "How soon unaccountable I became tired and sick." Where does the poem turn?

Keats ends a stanza "in faery lands forlorn," then begins the next, "Forlorn! the very word is like a bell / To toll me back from thee to my sole self!" Where does "Ode to a Nightingale" turn?

Sonnet 18 runs, "And every fair from fair sometime declines, / By chance, or nature's changing course untrimm'd: / But thy eternal summer shall not fade." Where does the sonnet turn?

Dickinson's carriage passes the school, "the fields of gazing grain" and "the setting sun," then: "We paused before a house that seemed / A swelling of the ground; / The roof was scarcely visible." Where does the poem turn?

"Ozymandias" ends, "Nothing beside remains. Round the decay / Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare / The lone and level sands stretch far away." What are these lines claiming?

Frost's speaker says of the roads, "Though as for that the passing there / Had worn them really about the same, / And both that morning equally lay / In leaves no step had trodden black." What is he claiming?

Housman's speaker says, "Now, of my threescore years and ten, / Twenty will not come again, / And take from seventy springs a score, / It only leaves me fifty more." What is he claiming?

Dickinson writes of hope, "And sweetest in the gale is heard; / And sore must be the storm / That could abash the little bird / That kept so many warm." What is the speaker claiming?

Shakespeare's speaker says, "Yet in these thoughts my self almost despising, / Haply I think on thee, and then my state, / Like to the lark at break of day arising / ... sings hymns at heaven's gate." What is he claiming?

Eliot prints the couplet "In the room the women come and go / Talking of Michelangelo" twice in "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock," once early and again later. What does bringing it back do?

In "The Raven," stanza after stanza closes with the same reply: "Quoth the Raven, 'Nevermore.'" What does ending stanza after stanza with that one word do?

Owen sets two lines apart as their own short stanza: "In all my dreams before my helpless sight / He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning." What does the stanza break around them do?

"Annabel Lee" opens "In a kingdom by the sea" and comes back to "In this kingdom by the sea" in the next stanza. What does repeating the phrase do?