Sonnet 73 offers bare boughs, twilight, and a dying fire, then ends: "This thou perceiv'st, which makes thy love more strong, / To love that well which thou must leave ere long." What does the couplet do?

After Sonnet 18 weighs summer's defects, it closes: "So long as men can breathe or eyes can see, / So long lives this, and this gives life to thee." How does the couplet revise the comparison?

In Sonnet 29, the speaker moves from disgrace to remembered love, ending: "For thy sweet love remember'd such wealth brings / That then I scorn to change my state with kings." What does the couplet secure?

Sonnet 130 mocks stock comparisons, then ends: "And yet, by heaven, I think my love as rare / As any she belied with false compare." What is the couplet's effect?

Sonnet 116 defines constant love, then closes: "If this be error and upon me proved, / I never writ, nor no man ever loved." What does the final couplet add to the definition?

Sonnet 60 tracks time driving minutes toward decay, then closes: "And yet to times in hope my verse shall stand, / Praising thy worth, despite his cruel hand." What does the couplet accomplish?

Sonnet 65 asks how beauty can withstand "sad mortality," then closes: "O, none, unless this miracle have might, / That in black ink my love may still shine bright." What turn does the couplet make?

In Sonnet 55, monuments fail but verse endures, and the couplet says, "So, till the judgment that yourself arise, / You live in this, and dwell in lovers' eyes." How does the close use the sonnet form?

Keats opens "Ode on a Grecian Urn" by addressing the urn: "Thou still unravish'd bride of quietness, / Thou foster-child of silence and slow time." What does the sustained address commit the ode to?

Shelley begins "Ode to the West Wind," "O wild West Wind, thou breath of Autumn's being." How does speaking to the wind shape the poem's argument?

In "To Autumn," Keats addresses the season as "Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness, / Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun." What does this address require of the ode?

Shelley's "To a Skylark" opens, "Hail to thee, blithe Spirit! / Bird thou never wert." What does the ode's direct address make possible?

Coleridge's "Dejection: An Ode" turns to a listener: "O Lady! we receive but what we give." What effect does that address have on the meditation?

"Lycidas" mourns for more than 160 lines before "Weep no more, woeful shepherds, weep no more, / For Lycidas, your sorrow, is not dead." What does the late consolation do?

In Shelley's elegy "Adonais," the poem eventually declares, "The soul of Adonais, like a star, / Beacons from the abode where the Eternal are." What does that placement do?

Gray's "Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard" moves from village graves to the epitaph, "Here rests his head upon the lap of Earth / A youth to Fortune and to Fame unknown." What does this closing placement achieve?

Whitman's elegy "When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd" later addresses death: "Come lovely and soothing death." What does delaying that address allow?

In "On My First Son," Jonson imagines the boy's epitaph: "Here doth lie / Ben Jonson his best piece of poetry." How does placing this crafted inscription after grief affect the elegy?

In Thomas's villanelle, "Do not go gentle into that good night" and "Rage, rage against the dying of the light" meet in the final stanza addressed to the father. What happens to the refrains?

Bishop's "One Art" repeats "The art of losing isn't hard to master," but ends with "though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster." What has the refrain become by the close?

Robinson's villanelle "The House on the Hill" closes by returning to "They are all gone away" and "There is nothing more to say." What effect do the refrains have at the end?

Roethke's villanelle "The Waking" returns to "I wake to sleep" and "I learn by going where I have to go." What do the refrains become by the close?

Auden's villanelle "If I Could Tell You" returns to "Time will say nothing but I told you so" and "If I could tell you I would let you know." What do the refrains finally emphasize?

Plath's villanelle "Mad Girl's Love Song" repeats "I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead" and "(I think I made you up inside my head.)" until they close the final stanza together. What do the joined refrains emphasize?

Whitman's open-form lines begin, "I celebrate myself, and sing myself, / And what I assume you shall assume." What does the lack of fixed meter let the poem do?

In Williams's open form, "so much depends / upon / a red wheel / barrow" breaks a small statement into short units. What do the line breaks do?

H.D.'s "Oread" commands, "Whirl up, sea— / whirl your pointed pines." How does open form help the image work?

Pound's "In a Station of the Metro" sets faces in a crowd beside "Petals on a wet, black bough." What does its open, compressed form make possible?

Sandburg's "Chicago" begins, "Hog Butcher for the World, / Tool Maker, Stacker of Wheat." What does the open-form catalogue allow?

In Hughes's open-form line, "I've known rivers ancient as the world," the sentence stretches across a broad historical claim. What does the form allow here?