It’s the final week of National Poetry Month. So fittingly, here’s a Pop Quiz on some notable closing lines of poems.
“Nevermore!” It might be difficult to end a poem on a more dramatic note than Edgar Allen Poe did in “The Raven.” Can you name the poets who created these ending lines? Bonus points for the name of the poem.
1. Till human voices wake us, and we drown.
2. My soul has grown deep like the rivers.
3. and so cold
4. And eternity in an hour
5. Petals on a wet, black bough.
6. Daddy, daddy, you bastard, I’m through.
Adapted from Don’t Know Much About Literature, a collection of literary quizzes I wrote in collaboration with Jenny Davis.
Answers
1. T.S. Eliot, “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”
2. Langston Hughes, “The Negro Speaks of Rivers”
3. William Carlos Williams, “This Is Just To Say”
4. William Blake, “To see a world in a grain of sand”
5. Ezra Pound, “In a Station of the Metro”
6. Sylvia Plath, “Daddy”
