STAAR EOC Test: Reading : Figurative Language
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Example Questions
Example Question #1 : Figurative Language
Adapted from “Solitary Death, make me thine own” in Underneath the Bough: A Book of Verses by Michael Field (pseudonym of Katherine Bradley and Edith Cooper) (1893)
Solitary Death, make me thine own,
And let us wander the bare fields together;
Yea, thou and I alone
Roving in unembittered unison forever.
I will not harry thy treasure-graves,
I do not ask thy still hands a lover;
My heart within me craves
To travel till we twain Time’s wilderness discover.
To sojourn with thee my soul was bred,
And I, the courtly sights of life refusing,
To the wide shadows fled,
And mused upon thee often as I fell a-musing.
Escaped from chaos, thy mother Night,
In her maiden breast a burthen that awed her,
By cavern waters white
Drew thee her first-born, her unfathered off-spring toward her.
On dewey plats, near twilight dingle,
She oft, to still thee from men’s sobs and curses
In thine ears a-tingle,
Pours her cool charms, her weird, reviving chaunt rehearses.
Though mortals menace thee or elude,
And from thy confines break in swift transgression.
Thou for thyself art sued
Of me, I claim thy cloudy purlieus my possession.
To a long freshwater, where the sea
Stirs the silver flux of the reeds and willows,
Come thou, and beckon me
To lie in the lull of the sand-sequestered billows:
Then take the life I have called my own
And to the liquid universe deliver;
Loosening my spirit’s zone,
Wrap round me as thy limbs the wind, the light, the river.
In the text, “Death” is personified as ________________.
a lover
a long-desired companion
a thief
the captain of a ship
a mother
a long-desired companion
In this poem, death is personified (and addressed) as a desired companion. While the description of the relationship sounds reasonably intimate, the speaker specifically states that he or she “do[es] not ask thy still hands a lover.” In literature, Death is more often characterized as a thief, but this piece is subverting that trope. "Night" is personified as death’s “mother,” and while the river is discussed at length, death is taking the speaker to the river, not ferrying the speaker across it on a boat.
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