Wednesday, May 17, 2006

Today’s Classic Quiz: One of My Favorite Poems.

Who wrote this (a lion of English literature, pun intended):

Tiger! Tiger! Burning bright/ In the forests of the night/ What immoral hand or eye/ Could frame thy dreadful symmetry? In what distant deeps or skies/ Burns the fire of thine eyes?/ On what wings dare he aspire?/ What the hand dare seize the fire?

The completion: What the hammer? What the chain?/ In what furnace was thy brain?/ What the anvil? What dread grasp/ Dare its deadly terrors clasp?


Honor code in effect: no cheating by looking it up in an anthology.

11 comments:

  1. The author was known as Saki, but his "real" name was Munro. What do I win?

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  2. .....this was written by William Blake. I didn't recall the last lines.

    By the way, while reading a biography of Tom Paine earlier this spring I learned that Blake tipped off Paine in time to keep him out of England's prisons for his "seditious" writings, including those in response to Edmund Burke. After the Jacobins took over France, Robert Morris -- the US ambassador to France at the time -- nearly let Paine die in the infamous prisons of France. It wasn't until after Jefferson was elected and Morris was replaced by Monroe that Paine got out and was nursed back to health.

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  3. William Blake.

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  4. William Blake.

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  5. William Blake.

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  6. William Blake.

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  7. William Blake.

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  8. William Blake.

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  9. William Blake.

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  10. William Blake.

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  11. I must confess that I was wrong. I was sure it was Munro, but it turns out that he wrote another famous tale about a tiger. And so, I guess the only thing I win is a dunce cap!

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