Question
Mary Ruefle’s poem “Deconstruction” claims that the answer to this question is the poem it appears in, because “there is nothing more seductive, more terrible, than the story of our own life.” For 10 points each:
[10h] Describe this question whose answer involves calling the protagonist the epithet “great glory of the Achaeans.” The “picturesque and mythical” speaker of a Margaret Atwood poem confides that the answer to this question is “a cry for help: Help me!” and complains, “Alas it is [boring] / but it works every time.”
ANSWER: what were the sirens singing in The Odyssey? [accept anything asking what siren song is; accept “Siren Song”]
[10e] In a likely reference to siren song, this character laments, “I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each. / I do not think that they will sing to me,” in a “Love Song” by T. S. Eliot.
ANSWER: J. Alfred Prufrock [accept “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”]
[10m] That Prufrock line is a response to this author’s reference to siren song in a poem which commands you to “Teach me to hear mermaids singing” and “Get with child a mandrake root.”
ANSWER: John Donne (The poem is “Go and catch a falling star.”)
<Mao, Poetry>
Summary
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