These are original Marlbridge practice questions, not past exam questions. Passages are either short extracts from public-domain poems (author, title and date given) or original poems written by Marlbridge for this page, and they are labelled as such. Mark points are a suggested Marlbridge rubric, not an official scoring guideline. Questions 1 to 6 are multiple choice; Questions 7 and 8 are written responses. Allow about 45 minutes. No calculator is needed.
Question 1 (multiple choice · foundation)
Read the opening and the turn of Christina Rossetti’s sonnet “Remember” (1862).
Remember me when I am gone away,
Gone far away into the silent land;
[…]
Only remember me; you understand
It will be late to counsel then or pray.
Yet if you should forget me for a while
And afterwards remember, do not grieve:
What is the main function of “Yet” at the start of the ninth line?
- (A) It introduces a shift from demanding to be remembered to allowing herself to be forgotten.
- (B) It shows that the speaker has changed her mind and no longer cares to be remembered at all.
- (C) It marks the end of the poem’s description of death and the start of a description of the listener’s daily life.
- (D) It repeats the speaker’s earlier command so that the listener cannot miss it.
Answer and explanation
Answer: (A). “Yet” is a volta: it turns the poem from the insistent “Remember me” of the first eight lines to a concession that forgetting would be acceptable. The speaker’s wish to be remembered is still present, but she now puts the listener’s peace first.
- (B) overstates the shift. The speaker still hopes to be remembered (“if you should… afterwards remember, do not grieve”); she does not stop caring, she qualifies her demand.
- (C) is wrong because the poem never describes the listener’s daily life; the opening lines speak of death and parting, and the turn is about what the listener should do with memory.
- (D) is wrong because “Yet” interrupts the repeated command; it does not repeat it.
Question 2 (multiple choice · core)
The final lines of John Donne’s sonnet “Death, be not proud” (published 1633) read:
One short sleep past, we wake eternally,
And death shall be no more; Death, thou shalt die.
Which description best explains the figure of speech in the last line?
- (A) It is situational irony, because the speaker expects death to be proud and it turns out to be humble.
- (B) It is verbal irony, because Donne means the opposite of what he says.
- (C) It is a juxtaposition, because death and life are placed on opposite sides of a stanza break.
- (D) It is a paradox, because the statement seems impossible but expresses a claim about eternal life that makes sense within the poem.
Answer and explanation
Answer: (D). Death cannot literally die, yet within the poem’s belief that death is only a “short sleep” before waking “eternally”, death’s power ends. The apparent contradiction reveals the idea that death is not final.
- (A) reverses the poem: the speaker is not expecting anything of death, and death is not humble. The poem addresses death with scorn from the first line.
- (B) fails because Donne means exactly what he says; there is no gap between statement and intention.
- (C) fails because the lines are not a contrast between two placed things across a break; the contradiction is inside one statement.
Question 3 (multiple choice · core)
Read this poem, “The Gardener’s Rule”, written by Marlbridge.
Each bed was edged with string and pegged with care;
each seedling stood a hand’s-width from the next;
no weed was left to trespass, none to spare,
the labels written out in careful text.He read the rain gauge daily, wrote it down,
and sold his marrows by the pound, not heap;
his coat was brushed, his boots were polished brown,
his sleep, he said, was dreamless, clean and deep.Then the frost came early. Nobody
knew where he kept the key; the labels ran
in the rain; a thrush, unscared, walked in between
the beds and ate
the last of his beans.
What is the most likely effect of the change in form in the last stanza?
- (A) It shows the speaker is bored and has lost interest in the gardener.
- (B) It highlights the collapse of the order the gardener imposed, because the neat, end-stopped, rhymed pattern breaks down.
- (C) It shows that the thrush is the real subject of the poem.
- (D) It proves that the gardener was careless in the first two stanzas.
Answer and explanation
Answer: (B). The first two stanzas are regular: each has four lines, a rhyme scheme (care / next / spare / text; down / heap / brown / deep) and mostly end-stopped lines. In the last stanza the rhyme disappears, the lines shorten, and sentences run across line breaks (“Nobody / knew where…”). The loss of pattern matches the loss of control and puts emphasis on the disorder.
- (A) has no textual basis; the speaker’s tone is observant, not bored.
- (C) misreads the thrush as the subject. It is a detail that shows nature taking over; the subject remains the gardener’s order and its end.
- (D) contradicts the evidence: the early stanzas show meticulous care. The poem sets that care against what follows.
Question 4 (multiple choice · core)
In Percy Bysshe Shelley’s “Ozymandias” (1818), the inscription on the pedestal reads “My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings; / Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!” and the poem ends “Nothing beside remains. Round the decay / Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare / The lone and level sands stretch far away.”
Which statement best describes the irony in these lines?
- (A) The traveller hates the king and is mocking his inscription.
- (B) The sculptor is flattering the king in a way that the king does not notice.
- (C) The desert is described as boundless, which contradicts the statue’s size.
- (D) The king intends his inscription to inspire despair at his greatness, but the surrounding ruin makes the reader despair at the impermanence of power.
Answer and explanation
Answer: (D). The inscription says one thing (be amazed and despair at my power); the setting shows another (nothing is left). The king’s own words now serve as evidence against his claim. This is situational irony built on juxtaposition.
- (A) attributes feelings to the traveller that the poem does not show; the traveller only reports what he saw.
- (B) is not supported; the poem says the sculptor “read” the king’s passions, which does not make him a flatterer.
- (C) misses the contrast. Describing the sands as “boundless” and the statue as “colossal” does not contradict itself; both express scale, and the larger one (the desert) overwhelms the smaller (the wreck).
Question 5 (multiple choice · core)
In Rossetti’s “Remember”, line 7 reads “Only remember me; you understand”. What is the best explanation of the effect of the semicolon in this line?
- (A) It introduces a list of the things the listener should remember.
- (B) It shows that the speaker has finished speaking and the poem’s narrator takes over.
- (C) It joins two independent clauses, linking the speaker’s single request to the listener’s knowledge of what she means, and keeps the plea compact.
- (D) It indicates the speaker is unsure of what she wants to say.
Answer and explanation
Answer: (C). The semicolon balances two clauses: the request (“Only remember me”) and the confidence that the listener understands why (“you understand”). It keeps the plea compact and intimate, and it holds the two ideas close while the sentence continues into the next line.
- (A) is wrong because nothing follows that resembles a list. A colon would be more likely to introduce one.
- (B) is wrong because there is no second voice in the poem; the speaker is the same throughout.
- (D) is wrong because the line is firm; “Only” makes it more insistent, not unsure.
Question 6 (multiple choice · core)
Which of the following short descriptions illustrates juxtaposition most clearly rather than irony or paradox?
- (A) A poem describes a wedding feast in four lines and a funeral procession in the next four, with no commentary between them.
- (B) A speaker says “What a delightful day” while describing a storm that has wrecked her house.
- (C) A speaker says “The more I give, the more I have.”
- (D) A poem about a lighthouse keeper ends with the keeper falling asleep during the one night a ship needs him.
Answer and explanation
Answer: (A). Placing two scenes directly side by side so that their difference becomes meaningful is juxtaposition; no statement or event overturns an expectation, and nothing contradicts itself.
- (B) is verbal irony: the words say the opposite of what the speaker means.
- (C) is a paradox: the statement seems self-contradictory but can express a truth about generosity.
- (D) is situational irony: the event is the opposite of what the situation leads us to expect.
Question 7 (written response · core)
Read the poem below by Thomas Hardy (written 1902, collected 1909). The speaker is a former soldier.
“Had he and I but met
By some old ancient inn,
We should have sat us down to wet
Right many a nipperkin!“But ranged as infantry,
And staring face to face,
I shot at him as he at me,
And killed him in his place.“I shot him dead because—
Because he was my foe,
Just so: my foe of course he was;
That’s clear enough; although“He thought he’d ’list, perhaps,
Off-hand like—just as I—
Was out of work—had sold his traps—
No other reason why.“Yes; quaint and curious war is!
You shoot a fellow down
You’d treat if met where any bar is,
Or help to half-a-crown.”
In a paragraph of about 150 words, explain how structure and contrast, such as the dash and repetition in the third stanza, the movement across the poem, or the final stanza, develop the speaker’s attitude toward the man he killed.
Answer and explanation
What a strong answer does. It identifies the speaker’s attitude (unsettled, puzzled, partly self-justifying), names at least two structural or contrast features, quotes briefly, and explains their effect on the poem’s meaning.
Sample response (written by Marlbridge). The structure of the poem enacts the speaker’s failing attempt to justify the killing. The first stanza imagines a friendly meeting (“sat us down to wet / Right many a nipperkin”), and the second stanza juxtaposes this with the battlefield (“ranged as infantry”), so the reader sees at once that the man could have been a drinking companion. In the third stanza the speaker’s confidence stumbles: the dash after “because” and the repetition of “Because he was my foe” show him reaching for a reason, and the hurried “Just so… That’s clear enough” sounds like a man persuading himself. The fourth stanza concedes that the dead man may have enlisted for the same reason as the speaker, being “out of work”, with “No other reason why”. The final stanza’s “quaint and curious” is an understatement that makes the irony sharper: war is the odd system in which you “shoot a fellow down” whom you would otherwise “treat”. The speaker’s plain voice therefore criticises war more effectively than a protest would.
Suggested Marlbridge rubric (4 points)
| Point | What earns it |
|---|---|
| 1 | States a defensible claim about the speaker’s attitude (e.g., uneasy self-justification) rather than summarising the story. |
| 2 | Identifies at least two relevant features (juxtaposition of inn and battlefield; broken phrasing and repetition; understatement in the last stanza). |
| 3 | Uses short, accurate quotations as evidence. |
| 4 | Explains how the features contribute to the poem’s meaning, not just that they exist. |
Question 8 (written response · stretch)
Write a short analytical paragraph (about 120 to 150 words) answering this question about “Remember” (quoted in Question 1 and in the study guide): How does the poem’s movement from the first eight lines to the last six contribute to its meaning? Your paragraph should include a defensible claim, at least two quoted words or phrases, and an explanation of how the turn shapes your reading of the poem as a whole.
Answer and explanation
Sample response (written by Marlbridge). Rossetti uses the movement from octave to sestet to turn a plea for remembrance into an act of release. The first eight lines build a pattern of insistence: “Remember me” opens two quatrains, and “Only remember me” narrows the request to a single demand. The volta at “Yet” breaks that rhythm and brings a long, conditional sentence in which the speaker gives permission to “forget”. The change from imperative to concession suggests that her love now matters more to her than her own memory. The final line, ending with “be sad”, places memory and sorrow together, so the poem leaves the reader with a love that would rather be forgotten than cause pain.
Suggested Marlbridge rubric (4 points)
| Point | What earns it |
|---|---|
| 1 | A defensible claim about the meaning of the movement (not “the poem has two parts”). |
| 2 | At least two accurate quoted words or phrases, one from each section. |
| 3 | Explanation of how the turn (the volta) changes tone or purpose. |
| 4 | Links the turn to the whole poem’s meaning, including the ending. |
How did you do?
- Questions 1 to 6 correct: structure and contrast are secure. Try the 8.2 study guide next.
- Missed 1, 3 or 5: reread the sections on pattern, punctuation and the volta in the study guide.
- Missed 2, 4 or 6: revisit the table of juxtaposition, irony and paradox; write one original example of each.
- Written responses below 3 points: rewrite after reading the weak-versus-strong table in the guide.