Memorable Lines from Memorable Poems Quiz

Answer: The Destruction of Sennacherib

Lord Byron first published "The Destruction of Sennacherib" in 1815. Wikipedia describes it as a song, as it was published in a work entitled "Hebrew Melodies". It relates to the failure of Assyrian king Sennacherib's assault on Jerusalem as related in the Bible's 2 Kings 18-19. According to Wikipedia, the poem's anapestic tetrameter (four feet, each having two unstressed syllables followed by a stressed syllable)is described as "a feel of the beat of a galloping horse's hooves."

Mark Twain especially liked the poem, and made several references to it in his works.

Answer: Jabberwocky

Lewis Carroll's nonsense poem is included in his 1871 novel "Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There". Alice finds the poem written in mirror writing and reads it. Perhaps the most famous nonsense poem ever, "Jabberwocky" is loaded with words cleverly invented by Carroll (Charles Lutwidge Dodgson), such as Bandersnatch, brillig, Borogove, tulgy, and many others.

Answer: Ozymandias

Percy Bysshe Shelley wrote "Ozymandias" in 1818 as part of a friendly competition with friend and fellow poet Horace Smith. Each wrote a sonnet with the same name, the Greek form of the name of Egyptian pharaoh Rameses II, who was in the news at the time because of an announcement by the British Museum of its acquisition of part of a large 13th-Century BC segment of a statue of the pharaoh.

Answer: The Tyger

Literary critic Alfred Kazin called "The Tyger" the "most famous" of William Blake's poems. It was first published in 1794 in Blake's "Songs of Experience." I love the opening lines, "Tyger Tyger, burning bright, / In the forests of the night..."

"The Tyger" is a sort of companion piece to "The Lamb," a poem in Blake's earlier collection, "Songs of Innocence". The opening lines to that poem are "Little Lamb, who made thee / Dost thou know who made thee..."

Answer: Dover Beach

Matthew Arnold's poem "Dover Beach" was first published in the author's 1867 work, "New Poems", but was most likely begun in 1851. Arnold honeymooned at Dover in 1951, and the poem may refer to that occasion when it states, "Ah, love, let us be true / To one another!" before going on to describe "the world" as having "neither joy nor love nor light / Nor certitude nor peace nor help from pain..." He concludes with the dark vision of that same world being "Where ignorant armies clash by night." Ouch, that is some honeymoon reference.

Answer: Kubla Khan

Samuel Taylor Coleridge's "Kubla Khan" was written after waking from an opium-influenced dream he had after reading about Xanadu and Kublai Khan. Subtitled "A Vision in a Dream: A Fragment", the poem remained unfinished, according to Coleridge, after his writing was interrupted by a friend's visit, at the conclusion of which he could no longer remember the lines he had planned to write.

"Kubla Khan" is considered a prime example of Romanticism in English poetry.

Answer: Abou Ben Adhem

James Henry Leigh Hunt, better known as just Leigh Hunt, saw "Abou Ben Adhem" first published in 1838 in S.C. Hall's "Book of Gems". According to the Poetry Foundation website, Hunt introduced to the public such poets as John Keats, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and Alfred, Lord Tennyson, as well as encouraging such writers as Charles Lamb and Charles Dickens.

Hunt's favorite poem was "Abou Ben Adhem" and the line "Write me as one who loves his fellow man" is on his epitaph.

Answer: To a Mouse

Widely regarded as the national poet of Scotland, Robert Burns is said to have written "To a Mouse" after having destroyed a mouse nest while plowing a field. His brother claims that Burns actually composed the poem while still holding the plow.

The poem's full original title was "Tae a Moose, on Turning Her Up in Her Nest with the Plough".

The title of John Steinbeck's 1937 novel "Of Mice and Men" is taken from the line of the poem in the question above, which appears in the poem's seventh stanza.

Answer: The Waste Land

T.S. Eliot's "The Waste Land" was first published in 1922 after several years of work, and with roughly only about half the content of the original draft. Much of the reason for the heavy editing was at the behest of Ezra Pound. For example, the opening lines quoted above first appeared on the second page of the original draft.

The long poem (434 lines) is divided into five sections and loosely follows the legend of the Holy Grail and the Fisher King, and includes several characters as well as significant references to the literature of Buddhism and the Hindu Upanishads.

Answer: Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard

Thomas Gray's "elegy" (though not actually written in an elegy form) was first published in 1751. The poem concludes with the description of the poet's grave, which is followed by an epitaph.

While nearing the end of completing "The Waste Land", T.S. Eliot and a friend were discussing "Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard" while walking in another churchyard. The friend remarked that if a modern poet could write such a poem, it might be as successful as Gray's work.