Questions and Answers

The Puritan poet Anne Bradstreet had her first book published without her consent--her brother-in-law took it to England, shopped around for a printer, and presented her with the bound volume. Embarrassed by the errata introduced into the manuscript and by what she considered its unfinished state, she wrote a poem titled "The Author to Her Book" in which she describes the poem as a baby that was taken too soon from lying by her side in her childbirth bed. On the final exam for my recent class, I asked the students to identify the poem's first line: "Thou ill-formed offspring of my feeble brain."

Here is what I got: "Lincoln writes this to the people who subject themelves to holding slaves. He wants to insist that the blacks and whites are similar because of their offspring. He writes this as a response to his First Inaugural Address."

I think I laughed out loud. Would Lincoln really address Southern slaveowners as "ill-formed offspring of [his] feeble brain?" And yet that wasn't even the best wrong answer. For your reading enjoyment, I give you:

1. Who said, "Travel is a fool's paradise," and what did s/he mean? (The correct answer is Emerson, who believed that our independent character is more important than our surroundings.)

"Benjamin Franklin in his autobiography asserted travel is a fool's paradise. The line means that it is paradise to see the world, but many dangers lie ahead if one was to travel considering them a fool."

2. Compare and contrast the depiction of slavery in Work X and Work Y.

"Someone once asserted that truth is a continuation. Truth is consistent, in that it never changes. Slavery is a truth in that it happened."

3. Discuss the author's point of view on the protagonist in Work Z.

"He is not a bad man nor a very good one. For his position he was quite good, but in the scheme of things it is not quite so good. Man needs to be just and good, yet they can only be as good and just as circumstances allow."