Two Poems, One Clock
On a multiple-choice section, a student has 60 minutes for 55 questions across five passages (roughly 11 questions per passage). She is strong on prose but slow on poetry. Working the passages in order, she reaches the final poem - a dense 14-line sonnet with a convoluted syntax - with 9 minutes left and 12 questions on it. On her first read she understands the general situation (a speaker addressing someone who is leaving) but not the shifts in the octet-to-sestet turn. She has flagged three questions as uncertain. She is deciding whether to (a) read the poem twice carefully and answer all 12, (b) answer the 9 she can do quickly and return, or (c) guess all 12 to bank time.
1. Evaluate the three strategies against the scoring realities of the multiple-choice section.
Read the worked answer
There is no penalty for wrong answers, so every question should be answered - this immediately rules out leaving any blank, and it means 'guessing all 12' (c) is not crazy as a floor, but it wastes the 9 minutes she actually has.
The real trade-off is (a) vs. (b). At ~45 seconds per question, 12 questions in 9 minutes is tight but feasible only if she does not over-invest in a second full read. A careful second read of a convoluted sonnet could eat 3–4 minutes, leaving under 30 seconds per question - a recipe for rushed misreads on questions she could have gotten. Strategy (b) is sounder: answer the 9 she can resolve, using the poem's turn as a structural cue (the sestet usually repositions the speaker's stance), then spend remaining time on the 3 flagged items. She should prioritize questions about the shift and tone (which reward her partial understanding) over questions demanding close parsing of a single tangled sentence.
2. She is stuck on a question asking for the function of a specific syntactically tangled sentence. What is a disciplined approach that does not require full comprehension?
Read the worked answer
Use structure and elimination rather than line-by-line translation. Steps:
- Locate the sentence's position: does it open the sestet (likely marking the turn/reinterpretation) or sit mid-octet (likely elaborating)? Position constrains function.
- Identify its grammatical spine - subject, main verb, object - even if modifiers are opaque. The main clause usually carries the function; subordinate clauses decorate it.
- Check the answer choices for ones that contradict the poem's established movement. If the speaker is moving from address to reflection, an answer claiming the sentence 'introduces a new character' or 'provides comic relief' is out on structural grounds.
- Among survivors, prefer the choice that describes a rhetorical function consistent with the turn (qualifying, retracting, intensifying) over one that merely restates content.
- If two remain, pick the one that is more modest in scope - extreme or absolute wording ('proves,' 'entirely reverses') is usually a trap in these items.