OK, I changed my Question #5 (the Eliot quote) to not be a “one wrong answer” one because it’s too confusing to score for any FB quiz app I’ve found (which I haven’t yet, for that matter, for various reasons).
I had trouble coming up with 2 more plausible answers though, and settled for one plausible one and one ridiculous one. Can anyone suggest something better for Choice D?
The question and its write-up in my answer key is now:
5. “This is the way the world ends / Not with a bang but a whimper.” What is this an allusion to, in its original source?
(A) Guy Fawkes, who was caught trying to blow up the English Parliament in 1605
(B) A global nuclear holocaust, wherein death would come so fast you’d barely have time to cry out
(C) A soldier’s death by poison gas in a World War I trench
(D) A boy being forced to shoot his destructive pet deer, who then runs away but eventually comes home to be a farmer
Answer: (A) Guy Fawkes! This ending to his poem “The Hollow Men” is T. S. Eliot’s most recognized quote, and the reference to Guy Fawkes is set up in one of the two opening epigrams to the poem, “A penny for the Old Guy”. This is a traditional thing for children to say in England to get money on Guy Fawkes Day (to offset the cost of making and burning an effigy of Guy), which commemorates the day he was foiled (“Remember, remember the Fifth of November / The gunpowder, treason and plot”). Instead of blowing up Parliament with a bang, he was tortured and executed as a traitor, which surely involved some whimpering.
The poem was published in 1925, well before World War II, and while it is replete with bleak images of death and destruction, thermonuclear annihilation was simply not in scope. Eliot himself would be quoted late in his life (1958) as saying he would choose different words if he were to write it anew: “…while the association of the H-bomb is irrelevant [to the poem], it would today come to everyone’s mind”.
In fact, Eliot never wrote any poems depicting war. It is Wilfred Owen’s poem “Dulce Et Decorum Est” which is about a soldier dying from poison gas in horrible detail, ending with the bitter lines: “My friend, you would not tell with such high zest / To children ardent for some desperate glory, / The old Lie: Dulce et Decorum est / Pro patria mori.” (Which is a quote from the ancient Roman poet Horace that means: “It is a sweet and fitting thing to die for one’s country.”) Owen himself served on the front, and died in the war one week before its end. His parents received notice of his death on November 11th, even as the town bells began pealing to celebrate the Armistice.
And the whole bit about the boy and the deer? That’s from a movie called “The Yearling”. You’re totally confused if you thought that was the answer!
