How to Respond to Week 4’s Poetry & Fiction Assignment
Three very different texts. One assignment that asks you to read carefully, think independently, and respond in your own words. This guide walks you through what each work is doing, what the questions are actually testing, and how to build confident, text-grounded responses — without copying answers from anywhere.
The Week 4 assignment pairs a piece of short fiction with two poems from completely different centuries. That combination is intentional. Hemingway (1927), Poe (1849), and Marvell (c. 1650) each approach love and time in a completely different register — implied, elegiac, and argumentative, respectively. The twelve questions test whether you can read closely enough to catch what each writer is doing beneath the surface of the words.
What This Guide Covers
How to Read This Assignment
The handout your professor included makes an important point: responding to literature is not about copying what the text says or finding the “right answer” online. It is about showing that you read carefully enough to understand what each work is communicating — and why. That applies even to multiple-choice questions.
What Multiple-Choice Literature Questions Are Testing
These questions are not random. Each one points to a specific literary technique, moment, or theme. Before picking an answer, ask yourself: what is happening in the text at this exact moment, what does the character say or do, and what does that imply? The correct answer is always traceable back to specific evidence in the text.
The Handout’s Core Advice — Applied Here
The handout says to annotate while you read, paraphrase ideas in your own words, and connect personally. For this assignment: underline a specific line or image that each question is pointing to. Then describe — out loud, before writing — what that moment tells you about the character, tone, or theme. That process leads you to the right answer and helps you explain it in your own words if asked.
“Hills Like White Elephants” — What Hemingway Is Doing
This story is famous for what it does not say. Hemingway never names the subject of the conversation. The man and the woman are discussing “the operation” — but the word abortion never appears. That is not an oversight. It is the entire technique.
Seven-Eighths of the Story Is Below the Surface
Hemingway believed a story’s meaning should be felt rather than stated. The real drama — the pregnancy, the pressure the man is putting on Jig, her quiet resistance and eventual resignation — is communicated entirely through what the characters say around the subject rather than about it. Readers assemble the actual conflict from fragments: the tone of the dialogue, the silences, the symbolic landscape, the way Jig’s statements shift over the course of the story.
What this means for the questions: Any question about “what the story is really about” or what a character’s dialogue “suggests” is asking you to identify the subtext. You need to read what is being implied, not just what is being said. Pay close attention to the gaps — what gets changed subject, what goes unanswered, what Jig says when she stops pushing back.The valley splits into two distinct landscapes. On one side: dry, barren hills. On the other: the Ebro valley, described as fertile, green, and full of grain and trees. Jig notices this contrast. She looks at both sides. The story places the couple at a junction — literally and symbolically — between two possible futures. That landscape is not decorative. It is doing structural work in the narrative.
Questions 1–4: How to Approach Them
All four Hemingway questions are about reading between the lines. Here is what each one is testing and where in the text to look.
What it is testing: Whether you identified the real subject of the conversation. The couple talks around a decision the man is pressuring Jig to make. No travel disagreement, no cultural misunderstanding, no jealousy. One character wants something from the other that the other has not agreed to.
Where to look: The section starting with “It’s really an awfully simple operation, Jig” — this is where the subtext breaks closest to the surface. The word “operation” appears repeatedly. The man insists it is simple; Jig’s responses grow quieter and more resigned. That dynamic is the conflict.
Tip for your own voice: Describe in your own words what each character wants at that moment of the story. That description is your evidence for whichever answer reflects an “unspoken decision.”
What it is testing: Your understanding of Hemingway’s technique. There is almost no description of internal emotion in this story. No narrator commentary on how anyone feels. Just dialogue, physical details, and action. The reader does all the inferential work.
Where to look: Read any exchange of dialogue and notice what the narrator does not tell you. You are never told that Jig is frustrated or that the man is impatient. You have to read those states from the words they choose, the pauses, the abrupt topic changes. That is the technique the question is pointing to.
Tip for your own voice: Pick one moment where you knew something about how a character was feeling without being told. Describe what in the text gave you that information. That is exactly what the handout means by using your own observations.
What it is testing: Whether you read the emotional arc of the conversation. Jig says “Would you please please please please please please please stop talking?” after a long stretch of the man insisting the operation is simple, that everything will be fine, that he knows lots of people who have done it. Her repetition of the word “please” is not polite. It is the speech act of someone who has run out of other ways to communicate what she is feeling.
Where to look: Read the full exchange that precedes that line. Count how many times the man reframes the operation as simple or fine. Then read Jig’s responses — they get shorter as the conversation continues. By the time she reaches that line, she is not making a request. She is expressing something much stronger.
Tip for your own voice: Ask yourself: has someone ever said something to you repeatedly until you needed them to stop? What did that repetition feel like from your side? That personal connection is the kind of authentic response the handout is encouraging.
What it is testing: Symbolism. The two sides of the valley — barren hills on one side, fertile valley on the other — are not just setting details. They mirror something about the choice being discussed. Jig looks at both sides. She remarks on them. The story makes clear she is aware of the contrast.
Where to look: The opening description of the hills and the Ebro valley. Then Jig’s comment: “And we could have all this.” She is looking at the fertile side. The barren side is associated with the hills she compared to white elephants — an idiom meaning something you have but do not want and cannot get rid of.
Tip for your own voice: Describe the two landscapes in your own words and what each one seems to represent given the conversation happening nearby. The contrast itself is your evidence.
“Annabel Lee” by Edgar Allan Poe — What the Poem Is Doing
This poem was published in 1849, the year Poe died — likely the last poem he wrote. It is an elegy: a poem of mourning for someone who has died. The speaker is a man recalling a childhood love who died young, and his devotion has not diminished. It has intensified. The poem’s structure, sound, and imagery all reinforce a single emotional state: grief transformed into something close to worship.
The Poem’s Sound — Why It Feels Like That
Poe was deliberate about sound. The poem has a ballad-like rhythm and uses heavy repetition — the name “Annabel Lee,” the phrase “In this kingdom by the sea,” the parallel structure of “the moon never beams… the stars never rise.” That repetition creates an incantatory effect, like a ritual or a prayer. It is not accidental. It enacts the obsessive, circling quality of grief.
The Poem’s Argument — Love as Eternal
The speaker argues that his love was so great that even the angels envied it — and that their envy caused her death. Then he argues that nothing — not the angels above nor demons below — can separate his soul from hers. The poem ends with him lying beside her tomb. That is not metaphor. He literally sleeps by her grave. The devotion has become indistinguishable from grief.
Questions about “Annabel Lee” will often ask about the effect of repeated phrases or the poem’s tone. The answer is almost always connected to the emotional state the speaker is conveying through that repetition: devotion, obsession, grief, reverence. The tone is not anxious or sarcastic or playful. It is solemn, worshipful, and completely sincere — even when the claims (angels envying the couple) would be considered grandiose in any other context.
Questions 5–8: How to Approach Them
All four Poe questions are about tone, theme, and poetic technique. The questions are straightforward if you have read the full poem rather than skimming it.
What it is testing: Whether you understood the poem’s central claim about love. The speaker does not present love as fading, shallow, or physically-driven. He presents it as transcendent — stronger than death, stronger than the angels and demons of heaven and the sea. The poem’s entire argument rests on this claim.
Where to look: The third and fifth stanzas. In the third stanza the speaker attributes Annabel Lee’s death to the angels’ envy. In the fifth, he insists that neither angels nor demons can break the connection between their souls. Both moves establish love as something that operates at a cosmic, spiritual level.
What it is testing: The function of poetic repetition. When a poet repeats a phrase — especially one as explicit as a declaration of love — the effect is emphasis and accumulation, not doubt or conflict. Each repetition reinforces the single emotional truth the poem is built on.
Where to look in this poem: The name “Annabel Lee” is repeated throughout. The phrase “In this kingdom by the sea” appears in almost every stanza. The parallel structures (“the moon never beams… the stars never rise…”) all work the same way. Ask: what emotional effect does hearing this name and phrase over and over produce in the reader? That is the effect the question is asking about.
What it is testing: Whether you can identify the poem’s thesis. This poem is not about love fading, love requiring sacrifice, or love causing pain in the way a tragedy does. It is about love that persists beyond death — a love so powerful that it cannot be extinguished by mortality, time, or supernatural forces. Every stanza reinforces that central claim.
Where to look: The final stanza. The speaker describes lying by Annabel Lee’s tomb every night. He still sees her in the moon and stars. Nothing has diminished. That is the poem’s final statement: love is unlimited and enduring. That line is literally your answer.
What it is testing: Tone identification. This requires reading the poem’s emotional register — the feeling behind the speaker’s words. There is nothing sarcastic here. Nothing anxious in the way an uncertain speaker is anxious. The playfulness of the word games in Marvell is completely absent. The speaker is grieving, but the grief is expressed with total solemnity and conviction.
Where to look: The opening lines establish the tone immediately — “It was many and many a year ago / In a kingdom by the sea.” That fairy-tale opening, paired with the ballad rhythm, creates a ceremonial, myth-like quality. The emotion is not raw or unstable. It has been shaped into something formal and devotional.
Tip for your own voice: Describe how the poem made you feel when you read it aloud. Tone is experienced before it is named. If it felt solemn and serious and a little haunting, that is exactly the register the question is pointing to.
“To His Coy Mistress” by Andrew Marvell — What the Poem Is Doing
This poem is one of the most famous examples of the carpe diem tradition in English literature. It was written around 1650, though not published until 1681, after Marvell’s death. The speaker is making an argument — a structured, three-part rhetorical case — to persuade the woman to act on love now.
If / But / Therefore — The Logic of the Poem
Marvell structures the poem as a logical argument. Part one (lines 1–20): “If we had unlimited time, your reluctance would be charming — I would spend centuries praising each part of you.” Part two (lines 21–32): “But we don’t. Time is running out. Death is coming. Your beauty will fade.” Part three (lines 33–46): “Therefore, let’s act now. Let’s seize love before time takes it.” The conclusion — the carpe diem argument — only makes sense if you have followed the two premises that set it up.
What this means for the questions: Questions about the poem’s theme, the speaker’s goal, and the phrase “Time’s wingèd chariot” all make more sense once you understand this three-part structure. Each question is asking about one of those three movements. Map the question to the part of the argument it is asking about.The phrase carpe diem (“seize the day”) comes from Horace’s Odes (23 BCE), Book I, Ode 11. The idea — that mortality makes present pleasures urgent — runs through Renaissance and seventeenth-century English lyric poetry. Robert Herrick’s “To the Virgins, to Make Much of Time” (1648) uses the same logic Marvell deploys: gather rosebuds while ye may, for time is running out. Marvell’s version is considered the most intellectually sophisticated because he structures the argument formally (if/but/therefore) rather than simply stating it. Understanding this tradition helps place the poem in a conversation about time, mortality, and desire that spans centuries of Western literature — and helps you recognise what the speaker’s “main goal” actually is when the question asks.
Questions 9–12: How to Approach Them
All four Marvell questions are about the poem’s argument structure, the speaker’s attitude toward time, and the carpe diem theme. The key to all of them is understanding that this poem is a rhetorical performance — the speaker is making a case, not simply expressing a feeling.
What it is testing: Whether you identified the poem’s rhetorical purpose. The speaker is not praising nature. He is not reflecting neutrally on time. He is not criticising society. He is trying to persuade a specific woman to do something specific — and the entire poem is structured in service of that persuasion.
Where to look: The final section (lines 33–46), where the argument lands: “Now therefore, while the youthful hue / Sits on thy skin like morning dew… Now let us sport us while we may.” The word “now” appears twice in quick succession. That is the conclusion the whole argument has been building toward. The speaker wants her to act — now, while youth and desire are still present.
What it is testing: Your ability to read a metaphor in context. The chariot is an image of speed — it is “wingèd,” meaning fast, and it is described as “hurrying near.” The speaker hears it approaching from behind. That image is doing specific work: it signals the transition from the hypothetical first section (“if we had all the time in the world”) to the urgent second section (“but we don’t — death is coming”).
Where to look: Lines 21–22. The image follows directly after the first section’s fantasy of unlimited time — the contrast between that leisurely vision and the sudden sound of the chariot is the poem’s tonal pivot. Before that line the poem is expansive. After it, everything tightens.
Tip for your own voice: Describe in your own words what the image made you feel when you read it. A winged chariot at your back — that is not peaceful. That sensation of time catching up is the whole effect the image is designed to produce.
What it is testing: Whether you understand what carpe diem actually means and how this poem uses it. The handout in your course materials explains that the glossary includes this term. Carpe diem does not encourage patience, spiritual seeking, or rejection of romance — it is the opposite of all three. It urges immediate action in the face of mortality.
Where to look: The third section of the poem, starting at line 33. “Now let us sport us while we may, / And now, like amorous birds of prey, / Rather at once our time devour / Than languish in his slow-chapped power.” The “languish” versus “devour” contrast is the carpe diem ethos in a single couplet: do not wait passively for time to consume you — consume it first.
What it is testing: The speaker’s relationship to time as a force. Is time neutral here? Generous? Irrelevant? Or is time framed as a threat — something working against human happiness that must be outwitted rather than accepted?
Where to look: The entire middle section of the poem (lines 21–32) is about time’s destructive power: youth fades, beauty fails, the grave waits. Then the final section uses the metaphor of “his slow-chapped power” — chapped meaning jaw, devouring — to cast time as a predator. The speaker wants to outrun it, not make peace with it.
Tip for your own voice: Think about whether the speaker sounds like someone who is comfortable with time passing or someone who is fighting against it. That instinct — your reading of the speaker’s emotional relationship with time — is exactly the kind of authentic response the assignment asks for.
Using Your Own Voice — What the Handout Is Really Asking For
Your professor included that handout for a reason. It is a reminder that the point of a literature assignment is not to locate a correct answer and transcribe it. It is to show that you engaged with the text — that you noticed something, felt something, or made a connection that is genuinely yours.
Response That Shows No Engagement
“The answer is C. Jig is pressured by the man to have an abortion. This is shown in the story by how the man talks about the operation.” This restates what is known. It shows the student read a summary somewhere.
Response That Shows Real Reading
“The main conflict is C — it centers on an unspoken decision about the woman’s pregnancy. The man keeps repeating that the operation is ‘simple’ and ‘nothing,’ but Jig’s responses get shorter and quieter as the conversation continues. By the time she asks him to please stop talking, she is not having a conversation anymore. She has already been worn down.”
Response That Paraphrases a Study Guide
“The tone of Annabel Lee is reverent and sincere because Poe uses many poetic devices including repetition and assonance to create a mournful effect throughout the poem.” Technically correct but clearly not the student’s observation.
Response in Your Own Words
“The tone is C — reverent and sincere. Reading it out loud, the rhythm feels almost like a prayer or a chant. The speaker never doubts his love or expresses bitterness. He just keeps describing it as bigger than anything — bigger than death, bigger than the angels. That certainty is what makes it feel sincere rather than dramatic.”
Annotate the text first — mark the specific line or moment each question points to. Then say out loud what that moment tells you, in words you would use in conversation. Write that down. You now have a response in your own voice that is grounded in the text.
Literary Terms You Need for This Assignment
| Term | What It Means | Where It Appears in These Texts |
|---|---|---|
| Subtext | The meaning beneath the surface of what characters say — what is implied but never stated | Central to all of “Hills Like White Elephants” — the entire story is subtext |
| Symbolism | When an object, place, or image represents something beyond its literal meaning | The hills and the fertile valley in Hemingway; the “wingèd chariot” in Marvell; the tomb in Poe |
| Tone | The speaker’s or narrator’s emotional attitude toward the subject | Reverent/sincere in Poe; urgent and persuasive in Marvell; flat and controlled in Hemingway |
| Carpe Diem | “Seize the day” — the argument that mortality makes present pleasures urgent | The entire argument structure of “To His Coy Mistress” |
| Elegy | A poem of mourning for someone who has died | “Annabel Lee” is an elegy — Poe is mourning a lost love |
| Metaphor | A direct comparison that says one thing is another | “Time’s wingèd chariot” — time as a vehicle rushing toward you |
| Repetition | Deliberate recurrence of words or phrases for emphasis or effect | Jig’s “please please please please”; “In this kingdom by the sea” in Poe; “Now” in Marvell’s conclusion |
| Iceberg Theory | Hemingway’s term for a technique where most of the story’s meaning is unstated — visible only through implication | The central technique of “Hills Like White Elephants” |
Frequently Asked Questions
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Before You Start Writing
Read each text once without stopping to answer anything. Get a feel for the whole piece first. Then go back to the questions and find the specific moment in the text each question is pointing to. Mark it. Say in your own words what is happening there.
The three texts are very different — Hemingway’s story is almost entirely subtext, Poe’s poem is almost entirely explicit about its subject, and Marvell’s poem is a logical argument dressed in beautiful imagery. The skill each one tests is slightly different. But in every case, the answer is in the text. You just need to find it and say what you see.
That is what using your own voice actually means here: not original ideas from nowhere, but honest observations about what you actually read.
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