Answer the following about poetic treatments of the sound of falling leaves, for 10 points each.
[10e] Mark Strand wrote of “the sound, say, of a few leaves falling, or just one leaf, / Or less” in a poem titled for this period and a porch. An object that “will not last” this period appears in Edna St. Vincent Millay’s “First Fig.”
ANSWER: night [or “The Night, the Porch”]
[10h] A poem in this form, “November Night,” calls it a “faint dry sound, / Like steps of passing ghosts.” The proto-imagist Adelaide Crapsey invented this poetic form before her 1914 death from tuberculosis in upstate New York.
ANSWER: cinquain (“SIN-kain”) [or American cinquain; prompt on five-line poems, quintain, or quintet]
[10m] Conrad Aiken wrote of a falling leaf that “soundless meets the grass” in a set of poems with this title. Aiken’s college buddy T. S. Eliot wrote a poem with this title that ends, “The worlds revolve like ancient women / Gathering fuel in vacant lots.”
ANSWER: “Preludes”
<JB, American Literature>