A poem and the time it came from

Grade 11 Reading Worksheet - Challenge Me

Circle the best answer.

1. Read this first

   Two Poems About Trains (Emily Dickinson (printed 1891) and Walt Whitman (1876), with a period note)

   Period note:
   [1] Between 1850 and 1880, railroad track in the United States grew from about nine thousand miles to more than ninety thousand, and the first railroad across the continent was completed in 1869.
   [2] In 1853 a railroad reached Amherst, Massachusetts, Emily Dickinson’s small hometown, and her father was one of the local leaders who had worked to bring it there.
   [3] Whitman published “To a Locomotive in Winter” in 1876, the year the United States celebrated its hundredth birthday with an exhibition of new machines in Philadelphia.

   Poem A, Emily Dickinson, “The Railway Train” (first line “I like to see it lap the miles”):
   [4] I like to see it lap the miles, / And lick the valleys up, / And stop to feed itself at tanks; / And then, prodigious, step
   [5] Around a pile of mountains, / And, supercilious, peer / In shanties by the sides of roads; / And then a quarry pare
   [6] To fit its sides, and crawl between, / Complaining all the while / In horrid, hooting stanza; / Then chase itself down hill
   [7] … Then, punctual as a star, / Stop—docile and omnipotent— / At its own stable door.

   Poem B, Walt Whitman, “To a Locomotive in Winter” (excerpt):
   [8] Thee for my recitative, / Thee in the driving storm even as now, the snow, the winter-day declining, / Thee in thy panoply, thy measur’d dual throbbing and thy beat convulsive, …
   [9] Type of the modern—emblem of motion and power—pulse of the continent, …
   [10] Fierce-throated beauty! / Roll through my chant with all thy lawless music, thy swinging lamps at night, … / To the free skies unpent and glad and strong.

   Word notes:
   [11] In Poem A, “prodigious” means enormous, “supercilious” means proudly looking down on others, and to “pare” is to trim or cut away.
   [12] “Docile” means obedient, and “omnipotent” means all-powerful.
   [13] In Poem B, a recitative is a passage sung in the rhythm of speech, and “panoply” means a splendid full display or covering.
   [14] A “type” is a symbol or representative example, and an emblem is a visible sign of an idea.
   [15] Dickinson’s poem is one sentence across four stanzas, numbered here by stanza, and one line, comparing the train to a figure from a religious text, is cut.

2. 1.

   Ari is comparing two poets of the railroad age. How do their attitudes toward the train differ?

   • Dickinson praises it solemnly as the “pulse of the continent”, while Whitman teases it as a creature.
   • Dickinson enjoys the train playfully, as an animal that feeds, peers and returns to its stable.
   • Both poets fear the train as a destructive machine that is ruining the quiet countryside.
   • Dickinson treats it with amused, teasing wonder; Whitman hails it with open praise.
3. 2.

   Bo draws a shared box between the two margins. What do both poems share that comes from their period?

   • Both appeared during the centennial of 1876, when the nation celebrated its new machines.
   • Both complain about the noise and smoke that the railroads brought into American towns.
   • Both treat the new railroad as a powerful living creature, a sign of the age’s amazement at the machine.
   • Dickinson describes the train in rhymed stanzas, while Whitman writes long unrhymed lines about the same machine.
4. 3.

   Esme is comparing styles. How does each poet’s style answer the new machine?

   • Whitman addresses the engine directly as “Thee”, so his lines rise to match the machine’s grandeur.
   • Dickinson uses quatrains with rhyme, and Whitman uses free verse without rhyme.
   • Dickinson’s long, rolling lines match the engine’s power, while Whitman’s short quatrains keep it small.
   • Dickinson shrinks it into a riddle in tidy quatrains; Whitman swells to match it.
5. 4.

   Jun compares the endings: Dickinson’s train stops “docile and omnipotent” at “its own stable door”; Whitman’s is sent “To the free skies”. What does the difference show?

   • Dickinson’s ending is ironic: “docile and omnipotent” puts two opposite ideas side by side.
   • Dickinson sets the machine free in the open sky, while Whitman tames it into an animal at rest.
   • Dickinson tames the machine into a homely animal at rest, while Whitman sets it free as a sign of boundless energy.
   • Both endings show the poets’ relief that the dangerous machine has finally stopped moving.
6. 5.

   Kira notices Dickinson never names the train in her lines, while Whitman calls it “Type of the modern”. How does each choice suit the poet’s view?

   • Dickinson uses the pronoun “it”, and Whitman uses the old-fashioned pronoun “Thee”.
   • Dickinson’s unnamed “it” teases the novelty; Whitman’s name honors it as a symbol.
   • Both poets lived through the years when railroad track grew to more than ninety thousand miles.
   • Dickinson names the engine proudly as a symbol, while Whitman hides it inside a riddle.

7. Two Harlem Renaissance Poems (Claude McKay (1922) and Langston Hughes (1926), with a period note)

   Period note:
   [1] During the 1920s the Harlem neighborhood of New York City became a center of Black American literature, music and art, and the movement is now called the Harlem Renaissance.
   [2] Many of its writers had recently arrived from the rural South or from the Caribbean, and they wrote about memory, identity and the place of Black Americans in a segregated nation.
   [3] Claude McKay, born in Jamaica, published Poem A in Harlem Shadows in 1922, and Langston Hughes, who grew up in the Midwest, collected Poem B in The Weary Blues in 1926.

   Poem A, Claude McKay, “The Tropics in New York”:
   [4] Bananas ripe and green, and ginger-root, / Cocoa in pods and alligator pears, / And tangerines and mangoes and grape fruit, / Fit for the highest prize at parish fairs, // Set in the window, bringing memories / Of fruit-trees laden by low-singing rills, / …
   [5] My eyes grew dim, and I could no more gaze; / A wave of longing through my body swept, / And, hungry for the old, familiar ways, / I turned aside and bowed my head and wept.

   Poem B, Langston Hughes, “Dream Variations”:
   [6] To fling my arms wide / In some place of the sun, / To whirl and to dance / Till the white day is done.
   [7] Then rest at cool evening / Beneath a tall tree / While night comes on gently, / Dark like me,— / That is my dream!
   [8] To fling my arms wide / In the face of the sun, / Dance! whirl! whirl! / Till the quick day is done.
   [9] Rest at pale evening.... / A tall, slim tree.... / Night coming tenderly / Black like me.

   Word notes:
   [10] In Poem A, alligator pears are avocados, a parish fair is a local country fair, and rills are small streams.
   [11] Two lines of Poem A, which describe the island skies and hills with religious images, are cut and marked with an ellipsis.
   [12] “Laden” means heavily loaded, and to grow “dim” here means to fill with tears.
   [13] In Poem B, the dots after “evening” and “tree” are printed as Hughes printed them, and they are not cuts.
   [14] A “variation” is a new version of a musical theme, so Poem B plays its first stanza again with changes.

8. 6.

   Noah draws a shared box between the margins. What do the two poems share that comes from the Harlem Renaissance period?

   • McKay writes about the past, while Hughes writes about a dream of the future.
   • Both describe the jazz clubs and dance halls that made Harlem famous in the 1920s.
   • Both voice a Black writer’s longing, in a segregated northern city, for a warm place of freedom and belonging.
   • Both writers had recently arrived from the South or the Caribbean, as part 2 says.
9. 7.

   Pia is linking form to feeling. How does each poem’s form carry its feeling?

   • Hughes repeats “To fling my arms wide”, so the second stanza becomes a faster, freer dance.
   • McKay’s short, repeated lines move like a dance, while Hughes’s rhymed quatrains end in tears.
   • Poem A rhymes in quatrains, and Poem B repeats its first stanza with some changes.
   • McKay’s quatrains build a list that collapses into tears; Hughes’s lines dance.
10. 8.

    Ren compares the endings: McKay’s “I turned aside and bowed my head and wept” and Hughes’s “Night coming tenderly / Black like me.” What does the contrast show?

    • Hughes ends with pride, matching the dark night to his own skin in a gentle image.
    • McKay ends in private grief; Hughes ends in calm pride in the gentle night.
    • McKay ends in calm pride in the gentle night, while Hughes ends in private tears for a lost home.
    • Both endings are bitter, showing that each poet has given up any hope of belonging.
11. 9.

    Tala thinks about the title “Dream Variations”. How does the idea of a musical variation suit the poem and its period?

    • Like a jazz or blues player replaying a theme, Hughes repeats his stanza faster, so the dream grows more urgent.
    • The second stanza changes “In some place of the sun” to “In the face of the sun”.
    • The second stanza slows the poem down, showing that the dream is fading away.
    • A variation is a new version of a musical theme, as part 14 of the word notes explains.
12. 10.

    Zee needs one detail from each poem for the shared box. Which pair best shows both poets linking a warm, sunny place with the home or freedom they long for?

    • Poem A’s tears, “bowed my head and wept”, and Poem B’s joy, “Dance! whirl! whirl!”.
    • Poem B’s “some place of the sun” and “In the face of the sun”.
    • Poem A’s tropical fruit “bringing memories” and Poem B’s “some place of the sun”.
    • Part 1’s Harlem neighborhood and part 2’s writers from the South or the Caribbean.